masked man connoisseur

You do feel like you’ve had a sickness steeping in your system, but you know that’s not what he’s referring to. You want to tell him. You want to tell him just to get it out there, he doesn’t even need to believe you, you just want to be able to say it—but you’re waiting too long, his face is warping with increasing concern and you’re unable to grasp for any words in your frenzied stream of consciousness. There is no lack of things to say, in fact it’s a torrent in your brain, straining its seams with the raw mass of things you’ve been needing to say, rolling and rolling and rolling into a looming knot of consciousness.

Not a word of it comes to your tongue. 

“The roommate situation is just exhausting,” you sigh, deciding this analogy has been working fine enough. It doesn’t alleviate a thing, no, not a single swipe off the mounting weight you’ve come to wear like a lead drape, but it lets you think you’re releasing something you’ve been holding onto. 

“You’re a good person,” Dale comments as he turns back in his chair, “it’s noble. But you don’t have to keep doing that for them if they’re this much trouble. I’ve been there and done that. I’ve been the couch surfer, going from friend to friend, and I knew to be grateful.”

Ah, yes, even though Dale is only a smidge older than you, and so not terribly far along in adulthood, he’s been through the works. His to-be ex wife had had it out for him for quite a time now, and for a while had made a habit of kicking him out for any minor argument—work hours, when to pick the kid up, what’s for dinner, him walking you to your car. Somehow, he never took a day off of work, showing up even when he had no reliable place to shower or sleep. You don’t want to say it’s commendable, it certainly didn’t get him any thanks from the company, but his work ethic is unmatched and fierce.

You drum your fingers along the back of his desk chair and give a halfhearted hum sort of sound. You don’t mean to be dismissive, you do appreciate the concern and from someone you know gives it authentically, but it’s just a subject you don’t know how to broach yet. Staring at the back of his head, you hope to transmit the message unspokenly, but he’s resuming his red ink tirade( now a little more thoughtfully).

Molly does her midday round and doesn’t ask once about the matter. Her smile seems restrained today, but you can’t blame her; she’s garnered the ire of much of the department for her enthusiasm over their participation in the career festival, and while you feel similarly, you know it was a decision made several levels above her.

Lunch is spent in the campus cafeteria for once, a location that might as well be new to you, who has come to be so accustomed to forking down lunch at your cubicle or anywhere but the main building. 

The last stretch of hours creeps by on stubby, inefficient legs. The oily orange of sunset doesn’t seem to dim at all as it spills through the windows and the clock ticks on above your desk. You have to check it every so often to confirm time is passing at all—the office seems suspended in time and space, an ethereal, infinitely spanning series of cubicles lit in unchanging evening.

You’re spinning in your chair as you stare at your computer screen, wriggling the mouse now and then to keep the screen on. They want you to organize a line of swatches for the career fair booth, a selection of various materials like the lineup you would propose to a client for them to choose from. As you pluck and drop various samples of oversaturated plastics and repurposed rubbers into a lineup, all you can think is how dreadfully boring playground design must be to high schoolers whose minds are much more likely occupied with oncoming finals. You’re still unsure if this is the type of job people aim for. Truly, if you were being honest, this was very much an “ok, sure, close enough” job that you hadn’t expected to stay in for so long. This was Dale’s plan B when he hadn’t landed his dream job designing shoes, and even Molly has just taken the role as a way to branch out from putting together product manuals.

A no-one’s-first-choice place. Your heart still longs, disloyal, dreaming of your passion that resides elsewhere, of multicolored pizza parlors and confetti-dappled arcade carpets. You still fervently draft out sketches of logos that’ll never have a sign to occupy and the layouts of party rooms so familiar to your childhood.

Clocking out comes with a taste of sour apprehension. Home has still yet to feel like home again since its newest addition, and especially after yesterday’s display, there’s an extra layer of uncertainty that’s spread especially thick on your subconscious. He’s been restraining it to a degree, but he has a hellish sort of strength and an animal sense of morality, if you want to think he has one at all. You’ve welcomed something wicked into your house with open arms.

The drive home, the long drive home, gives you a good while to let that anxiety brew and bubble, a nauseating stew that weighs in your belly like white-hot lead. You look frequently at your rear view mirror like your own face, cropped just to your narrowed eyes, will offer you some sort of guidance not found internally. You flex and loosen your fingers on the steering wheel.

Your unoccupied driveway is not familiar, and the stairs up your porch are alien. You stand in front of your house like you’re meant to knock and wait.

Some part of you expects a scene of some sort as you unlock the front door. Great, wide tears across the wall and upturned furniture, every last of the knives in your set stabbed through various surfaces, maybe punctured deep into the cotton innards of your beloved woven throw pillows, some on the ceiling, others plunged into paintings to draw colorful, gouache blood. You were never entirely sure if you wanted kids, but now you get a nice sample of just the boons of them–a domestic tantrum. 

Everything is in its place, but your heart doesn’t settle: you go straight for your room, only letting yourself exhale when you confirm the security and contents of your gun safe.

You feel like you’re toddler-proofing your own home, and yet the reality is not as innocuous as that image would suggest—you’re reorganizing your life to accommodate a violent, mechanized rabbit-thing. How far are you gonna go in restructuring your life for the beast? When is the price tag and the brief, novel sentimentality of it not worth the burden he continuously demonstrates himself to be? You know it’s not that, you know it’s because you’re lonely. That’s why you’re eating dinner with him.

It’s not the best description of the arrangement—the garage is open to welcome the late spring evening air and relieve the chemical stink baking while you were away. You’ve wiped off your old radio and are letting it cycle through whatever palatable-enough station you settled in. And yes, you’re sitting next to him, picking at your food with a fork as you think.

“Yesterday was a bit rough, huh? For both of us,” you finally say, stirring the salad around on your plate. You’re thankful you spent the time to dig up that old radio so that its ambiance can bleed through the unforgiving silence.

You take a bite and don’t chew.

“Do you want to hurt me?”

You don’t think so, or you don’t think he wants to kill you—you’ve given him ample opportunity you realize, thinking to the many nights now asleep, trusting that two locked doors will provide some semblance of protection. Just two wooden rectangles and the five meters it takes to get from the garage entrance to your bedroom. 

“I just want to help you,” you continue, fork clinking as you set it down. You look in his motionless eyes for direction, but the colorless chasms that you find in return offer nothing. 

“Let me know if I’m not doing that, I don’t know, I’m just not sure what you want.”

Suddenly, eye contact, even if seeming unrequited, feels too hard, and you’re staring down at your feet against the black peppered concrete floor. Your eyes trace up and down the cracks that cut across it like little networks of tree roots as the silence in the room thickens and curdles.

You retrieve your fork again to click it against your plate and look up at the rabbit-thing.

“How about some music?”

You stand and pretend not to steal a glance at the hole in your stool, at the way the metal curls around the exit wound like weeping flesh.

There’s a ‘70s station, and you contemplate it as you twist the dial of the radio past the selection of many, many country variants. Is that like trying to rouse nostalgia out of someone by playing nursery rhymes? It seems distasteful, so you scroll past and settle on classical. That’s what they’re always playing for animals and what seems to garner a universal, interspecies appreciation.

It doesn’t last a minute after you leave the garage to set the dishes in the sink, so you stand there, sigh, and stare, dead-eyed, out the kitchen window.

Another standstill. 

The water stings hot relief on your skin. You hold your arms out and rotate them under the spray of the shower head, watching water unfurl over your forearms and disperse in various trails. The rest of your body, naked, blooms with goosebumps. You step into the spew of water and soupy steam.

It’s all trust now, that’s what you’re putting your everything in, some misplaced and questionable notion of trust.

Slowly, you crane your head forward and let your forehead rest against the milky shower tile, suds trailing from your face like frothy tears. Behind the wall, you hear the slight shuddering and groaning of the pipes, but beyond that, you listen. The hum of the air conditioning in the living room, the skittering of the squirrels you’re still trying to rid from your attic, the silence of the garage. You listen long and hard even as the shower beats down noisily and splatters on the porcelain bathtub floor. Your skin is hot, but the tile is as cold as a corpse, nipping—it burns somewhat, but you can’t tell if it’s a frigid or broiling sensation. You close your eyes. Water catches on your eyelashes and beads, fatter and fatter until it slips and wets the porcelain under your toes. 

You stand like that for much longer than you think. Slowly, you turn yourself over, letting the wall of the shower cool your back. You’re so lonely. What were you expecting? Was he supposed to join you?

Around this time, Smudge would’ve been pawing at the door, and then you’d have to step out and grab blindly for the handle to crack it open enough for him to slide through. He’d jump up onto the sink and lay in the basin as you showered, only getting up when he heard the turning of the shower knob. 

Like you might will it just out of hope, you listen for the approaching pitter-patter of careful paws.

The next payday, you’re at the shelter before you’ve even checked to see if the paycheck has been processed. You’ve done a good job not checking your bank account at all, this past week, still in recovery from your concerning purchase.

It’s cold and unwelcoming, the entrance resembling something of a prison visiting room with its oppressive, concrete walls and dim artificial lights. The rows of bars and foggy glass partitions do it no service to deviate from this image.

You’re at the very end, looking into a mostly undecorated room of cats lazing about. You’re looking for spots, for timid blue eyes.

You feel weird—you’re not drawn to any of them, and then you wonder if that’s an inappropriate thing to think, like you’re browsing shelves of products rather than animals. Then you wonder if this is just a bandage for your ache, if you’re attempting to smooth a band-aid over an open and throbbing cavity as it spits blood. 

Your eyes finally settle on one, perched in the corner on a sad, single-story cat tower. He’s old, undoubtedly, white blooming in his otherwise gray fur like flames bursting across a field. One eye is brilliantly yellow, deceptively bright and youthful, but the color doesn’t reach the other eye: it’s milky, like deep-sea substrate, the pupil capped by a cataract. His fur, a mottled gray, appears cropped oddly in areas and thick and wild in others. It looks weirdly patchy before you realize that’s exposed skin, marked by trails and ridges of scabbing. His tail, which you note is crooked, is cropped at a length that would be odd if it were intentional, certainly not for cosmetic purposes. 

“She’s been through so much,” a voice rings from behind you as you see a figure step into your peripheral vision. You jump. It’s the attendant that you were certain, a moment ago, was tending to the front desk, but now she’s standing next to you with her hands clasped in front. An oversized button hanging loosely off the breast of her sweater declares that she’s a volunteer. She turns to you and you’re a little uneased by how intensely green her eyes are. A disarmingly gentle expression calms you quickly. Your intent stare is her confirmation to continue.

“We think she’s in her early twenties, outlived her first family in a house fire, and then just kinda rotated through a series of tragedies. She’s made the most of those eight other lives, for sure. Hit by a car—twice—bookshelf fell on her, I think another car—that took her tail…” She trails off, but you see her counting on her fingers as she mouths the rest silently.

“How long has she been here?” you ask, hands on the glass. You know the fate of most senior cats.

Her smile turns a little strained, but you both understand.

“Four years.”

You nod like you already knew and turn back to the glass, scratched and foggy from excited hands.

“Her name is Mothball,” the attendant continues after a pause, turning to you with another comforting smile.

That finally gets you to crack one of your own. You drum your fingers along the frame of the window.

“…I could show you to the other section with all of our younger cats, if you’d like.”

You’re quick to shake your head.

“Oh no, she’s perfect.”

You don’t take her home that night, as much as it aches to imagine that frail old lady in a concrete box, sleeping on a cot no thicker than the typical spring morning’s delicate sheet of frost.

It’s an investment you can’t make right now, emotionally, mostly. There was an undeniable life to her eyes despite a tattered appearance, but you don’t know if you’d be ready to say bye again so soon. There’s selfishness in that, you know, but your heart is a little too tender to see a life so briefly step in and out of your life. 

At home, you stand in the side alley of your house, leaning against the exterior wall of the kitchen. Overhead the outdoor light burns a sedated orange and moths flutter around it incessantly in a flurry of dark-colored wings. You wonder how they can spend so much of their short, quaint life seeking something never in grasp, then you have to wonder if they can even conceptualize what a short life they live at all. Some being out there must think the same of you.

You hold the cracked knife over the open mouth of the trash can, studying the series of little fractures that fan out across the blade like veins. Your glossy reflection blinks back at you, unsure, segmented into a million little splinters.

It was from a good set of knives too, a housewarming gift from a friend before they moved several states away and communication waned. You run your thumb down its spine.

Somehow, you’ve found yourself more troubled today by the regression of progress rather than the reinstatement of his innate danger.

You toss it into the trash can and wheel it out to the curb.

You dream of killing someone, plunging some manner of bladed weapon that your mind doesn’t care to distinguish into the throat of someone you don’t know. You don’t feel anything, and it seems like they don’t either. Their wide eyes strain to look at you, irises swollen by the white of their sclera and given color by branches of little pink veins. Sweat pills on their face and makes their skin glossy. Your hands are slick with your own. And yet they’re silent. Their mouth is closed but unobstructed, and yet it might as well be fastened tight with stitches. You search desperately for a reaction, you feel like a voyeur. There’s no distinct emotion felt, but you are disturbed by your fixation on their wound, the swelling of ruby blood around the inserted blade. It glitters under a light whose source is unclear. You press it further into the bulge of an artery and watch the liquid surge and run down the sides of their neck as it flexes with their heartbeat.

You swallow, expecting pain in your own throat. You try to apologize, still confused by it all, but someone else laughs from out of your mouth.

You wake with a start. Your hands fly next to you for Smudge but only feel your pillow, cold with disuse.

You let your heart rate settle and wipe away the thickening sweat from your forehead. 

Your shower has seen double the use since the onset of these troubling dreams, though this one is distinctly more grotesque. You stand anyway to make your way to the bathroom, and in your journey finally notice your bedroom door left open, swaying slightly on its hinge. Although things have settled down enough for you to forgo always locking it, you never leave your bedroom door open, it’s certainly something you would’ve noticed.

For a moment, you just stare at it, still not fully alert and still swatting away the fog of sleep. And then you dash, essentially lunging for your closet, tearing the door with such force that it sounds like, and it probably does, rip from its track. It's a loud sound of defiance. Not even the sight of your gun safe, pristine and safely bolted shut, appeases you; you run through the series of locks and wrench the door open. The knife block with its one empty slot, and your Walther PDP, lie untouched, awaiting you. It doesn’t placate you as much as you’d like.

If you were any reasonable person, your unease would be you acknowledging that your little comfort handgun would do all of nothing against a supernatural force like the rabbit-beast, but you know well you’re not reasonable. Your circumstances are purely self-imposed, and your disturbance lies elsewhere.

You’re unsettled because there’s strife in the connection you’ve been tending to so fiercely. 

Progress is not linear, and you can acknowledge this, but it feels like you’ve been at a standstill with the rabbit-thing. You’re stuck in a perpetual one-step-forward, two-steps-back tango, and it’s driving you mad, the constant whiplash between these periods of growth and the instances of mistrust and fear. Hiding in your own home, white-knuckle gripping a knife in sleep. You want out.

You’re confused when your vision starts to prickle with areas of fuzz, blooming rapidly across your waterline. When you try to blink the haze away, it disperses into tears, falling and wetting the back of your hands as you sit, defeated, on your knees in your closet. You didn’t realize you were crying, maybe because it’s soundless, distinguished only by small stutters in your breath and the dampness as it collects on your cheeks. It’s just been mounting and mounting you realize as you hang your head forward and let the tears fall freely, just so you don’t have to feel their descent down your face. Everything’s been piling up, and for a while now.

There’s no obligation to keep him. Yes, the price was astounding, and you’re still in recovery, but it’s apparent now that the distress he’s causing is amounting to a much steeper toll. You can give him away, maybe just roll him down to the curb and call for a junk pickup, maybe put him up for any pitiful asking price on a second-hand market. Immediately, you think this must be the same course of events to have led to the initial listing you stumbled across; it doesn't necessarily make sense when you consider the steep price tag (if Kurt were in such a rush to free his hands of the rabbit-thing, you imagine he would’ve taken anything) but you bought him, did you not? He knew someone would see the Fazbear branding and skim through all the other details, just as you had. Maybe he even explicitly divulged somewhere in the scrawling mass of paragraphs that hey, this thing is alive, dangerous, and is intent on making your life hellish, and the blame can only be on you for not taking the time to read up. You knew this was a massive undertaking, but this isn’t something someone could ever really expect, and now you need out. 

Finally, you weep openly, a cracked cry splintering from your mouth. It’s just one sound. You can’t force any more out, even as the tears keep raging on. You try and try to claw it out like snaking a drain but your sobbing remains noiseless.

In your wet sniffling, you’re startled by the sudden and distinct smell of charred death burning hot in your nostrils. It’s so alien in the bedroom you keep obsessively clean that it startles you out of your tears. You sniff again and the scent stings your eyes worse than your tears do; in your dreams, the sensation is a uniquely spectral cold, but you know this one belongs to him still.

You lift your head slowly and turn it, just as measuredly, to the open door. 

Tall and imposing, even with his head cocked to the side, he consumes the entirety of the doorway. His stance is leisurely, unbothered, weight borne on one of his great metal feet so his posture is uneven and relaxed. White pinprick pupils 

“Hey,” you start, not quite a whisper, as you rise slowly. You’re not sure what you’re doing, what you’ll do when you stand, but you lift yourself carefully like approaching a cat and not like he’s three times both your height and weight. You let him see your hands, stretching your palms out in front of you.

You have to wonder if you’ve stepped from one dream to another, but everything is too precise and distinct, not the typical formless, indeterminate mess of distantly familiar shapes and muted color gradients that characterize your dreamscapes. Each sensation is sharp and exact; you feel the slow descent of stray tears saturating your cheeks, the twitch in your fingers, the fading ache in your knees from the wooden floor. 

You know it has to be intentional, this appearance has to be at his discretion. Fully facing him, you step forward. He disappears at once. 

You go to chase but stop yourself. 

The next time you wake, it’s properly light out and late. Your hand flies up to your face to wipe away the wet of snot on your upper lip. A challenged inhale confirms that you’re sick. It’s almost a relief because at least you can try to reason that these recent bizarre nighttime scenes can be attributed to your brewing fever, whether or not it’s realistic for the spread of time. 

You’re already half an hour past your usual wake-up time but still spend an extra ten or so minutes staring at the ceiling, suddenly interested in the arbitrary paths of the floaters as they dance in your vision. 

You swallow a mouthful of sour disgruntlement and finally dig out your phone to make the dreaded call out. Realistically, there’s no need to stress—you don’t think you’ve even touched your paid sick time in over a year, but you’ve always been the restless type and the idea of being bed-bound for the day makes you fuss around in the sheets. This is good for you, you scold yourself, you need the rest. You still get up anyways.

The kettle clinks as you place it on the burner cap and click and twist the knob onto medium. You rake through your drawer of loose tea bags that you’ve been intending to organize for forever until you find something mild and comforting. The flame beneath hisses to life and settles to a steady flow of heat.

As you stand, leaning against the counter, your eyes wander to the garage door. 

He’s back in his place in the chair, and for whatever reason this infuriates you. Your instinct is to race over and confront him—I know you can move, we both know, stop playing this game—but your next thought, the rational one, can understand this is part of the problem that keeps this cycle infinitely perpetuated; you’re treating him like a toddler or a misbehaving dog, you’re scolding him and wagging your finger and completely ignoring the reality that is the unbalance in this dynamic. It’s not all that unlike the people who pluck wild animals from their environments, put them in domestic settings, and then reprimand them like you would a small dog when they inevitably revert to their natural behavior. He’s no rebellious child and he’s demonstrated this repeatedly. 

You feel stupid and small again, knowing all the while that that is your undisputable reality, the one you’ve been dancing around like you know no better. Your gut twists, already unsettled by your fever and now further gnarled in a knot of horrible doubt.

“Hi,” you call out, just so he hears your voice before he sees you. You wipe your nose again even while it burns with irritation, hoping your sickly appearance isn’t taken for emotionality (even while there is, pooling and swelling beneath the surface—both of you know this).

As you walk around him to come around to his left, you catch sight of your workbench. Atop, the white thread is placed centermost. 

The tea streams hot into your ceramic mug, the one stubbornly kept alive through various moves and fractures as denoted by puffy epoxy scars. You tap the tea strainer twice to coerce the remaining drops down and set it in the sink, and then you’re scattering back to the garage to reclaim your seat on the stool.

You bite your tongue to force down any smart remarks that you don’t trust yourself to hold—You finally came around, huh? If this is him extending an olive branch, you should accept it gracefully. You’ve been too lackadaisical about your quips and jabs, too used to these interactions being one-sided, consequenceless.

Retrieving your needle and threading the white through the eye of it, you avoid his fixed stare.

You draw the stool forward (it still works for its intended purpose, so you make no note to replace it) and place a hand on his upper chest to stabilize yourself. Your marks are still visible on the darker fur of his chest, and so you produce the first button and go ahead with aligning it in the center of his sternum. You pause before you make the first puncture, finally looking up at him, looking at him entirely, searching for signs of discomfort that are too human to be found on him.

You know he could resist, and so his stillness is permission; the needle goes in with some resistance but clears the exterior fabric and wriggles free to the other side. Retrieving it from the other end is a little more of a hassle, as you have to loop your other hand through the opening of his arm socket so you can maneuver the needle back around to pierce the chest again. This is by far the closest you’ve been to him, your nose grazing his fur as you lean forward and back, the needle following your movements. You’re pleased at least how clean the fur looks this close up and that his smell has been made quite mild, though it still lingers. Flesh brushes against fur and fingers glide along mechanical bones as you fasten the second button some inches lower than the first.

It’s odd to be fiddling around in his chest cavity knowing life thrums in it—yes, you’ve sifted around many robotic intestines, but wondering how much he feels of this makes you feel queasy. You don’t worry that it’s painful, you know he wouldn’t permit your rummaging if so, but it’s too close and too intimate, not clinical like it typically feels. You swallow a hundred times and focus so intently on the appearing and receding needle to avoid those dark eyes.

By the third button, your face is pressed up against the length of his chest, and you’re now hurriedly weaving the needle in and out, drawing each loop tight before plunging it back into fabric skin.

You’re delicate with your efforts, all the while not convinced you could even get him to stagger if coming at him with full force. Just hauling him up and into the bed of your pickup truck the first day had done a number on your back.

Whether your gentle approach is out of wariness or some tender sense of responsibility (all your projects are very dear to you), isn’t entirely clear to you.

Is this the only taste of intimacy you’ll get? That thought stops you completely, and then, hurriedly, you complete the last few loops and snip the remaining tail of thread with your embroidery scissors. Going back over, you wriggle each button to make sure it’s fastened securely and tight against his chest. None of them give, so you’re satisfied.

You pat his chest and look up to him as confirmation.

“There you are,” you hum out, running a finger over the column of fat, shiny buttons. You use your pad to rub away a grayish smudge and then push back on the stool. 

Then you’re up, cramming the needle and thread relatively back into place and snapping the sewing set closed. You don’t take the time to find its rightful place on the workbench and instead hurry out of the room, still holding it, slapping it down on the countertop and exhaling for what feels like the first time in an hour. You’d think you were drowning just a moment ago with the desperate ruckus of gasping you’re making now, gulping down the lighter, thinner air of the kitchen like it’s a taste of something you won’t get anytime again.  

What is your problem? you wonder, picking back up your sewing kit and turning it over and over in your hands. Neither side offers an answer, so it goes back onto the counter shoved behind a misplaced cereal box.

The hand on the countertop, initially just to balance yourself, curls into a claw, knuckles flaring with strain. 

Breakfast is prepared to the audio of a podcast, just to fill the kitchen space with a voice besides the one crying out in your head, calling you desperate, desperate, lonely, horrible.

You thumb the volume button up several levels until the back and forth of the two hosts drowns out even your own internal voice reading off the back of your pancake mix.

You hope your sickness doesn’t stick around too awfully long.

Your fever rages on in your sleep, and so you toss and turn throughout the hours, opening your eyes every so often to watch the headlights of cars swim across the gaps of your window blinds. Whatever sleep you manage is dreamless, but this is no relief; those dreams of yours have no chemical rationale, and so you have to wonder if your loneliness is so profound that you envision stroking the head of a mangled animatronic beast.

The third time you wake up, sheets clinging to you with sticky sweat and a wicked cough that rattles your ribcage, you don’t try to force sleep again. You fetch a can of tomato soup and heat it in a saucepan, and when it’s done and ladled into your last remaining clean bowl, you sit with him and eat. The radio crones blues and you pull up the garage door to let the night seep in. 

The next day, still fending off the fog of a fever, you’re starting efforts in constructing feet for your rabbit friend. The mechanic, skeletal feet left behind in the wake of prolonged decay are quite jarring when compared to the relatively cartoonish proportions emphasized elsewhere in the body; they’re almost anatomical, a little too bone-like in their design, and once again you have to shiver off the image of a corpse behind the fabric exterior. 

Spread out across your workbench are an array of grainy photos you’ve grabbed and printed from the internet of his likeness in his heydays, fully skinned and with charming green eyes now found nowhere in his appearance. Scattered as they are now across the tabletop, it looks like the scene of a frenzied detective rifling through evidence, but you’re just snatching one every so often for reference as you outline the sole of the first foot. 

You’re still frequently wiping at your nose, and an insistent headache thrumming behind your eye refused to be alleviated by any of the painkillers in your cabinet–additionally, the approaching heat of nearly-summer makes your ailment a particularly miserable affair. You can’t even have the fan on you in worry that it’ll aggravate your condition, so you down full mugs of water like peasants would ale. 

“You had a little bow, huh?” you muse between sniffles, tapping on an image of him taken from the side as he performs on a stage, soaked in grayscale stage light. It’s hard to imagine that the beast that sits next to you is the same one that appears pristine and lively in the photograph. The rotting smile you know is here full and fitted with bright teeth, a sparkle to the lovingly painted eyes and animation to his posture that is distinctly pained now. You’re still quite bitter that such a lovely piece of work was besmirched by some cheap pop up haunt who hadn’t a clue what a nostalgic treasure they were working with, and now you’re stuck scrubbing out blood stains from tacky fur )still with no idea how you’ll go about dismantling the bloated body inside).

You empty the remaining contents of your mug and set it down next to the radio, currently playing an audio documentary about the decline of play places in America. You’ve been listening on and off, genuinely interested in the topic but also closely invested in the math demanded of your current endeavor. This is always the part you dread the mouth—there are only a margin of artists who enjoy the mathematical aspects of their craft, and though you have profound respect for them, you’ll never be one of them. You want to get to the color and the frills and all the loving flairs. Your eyes just glaze over as you jot down a list of values.

You get an outline you feel pretty confident in, so fetch and uncap your X-ACTO knife to start sawing it out from the rest of the roll of fabric. In the background, an older man’s voice recounts the early years of the inclusion of playplaces in family restaurants.

The ache of thirst remanifests in your throat, along with a new burn that throbs like an open wound. You sigh—time for another pot of tea, this time drowned in honey to soothe your agitated throat. 

When the narration fades out for a segment of restaurant ambience, children’s shrieking laughter and the pitter patter of hands and feet on playplace tubing, you take the chance to stand and move back to the kitchen. There, you find your pot of chamomile has run out, so you chuck the cold dregs in the sink and fill the kettle with water. You rifle through your drawer of teas and decide some peppermint tea will do your tender throat good. 

You know to keep an attentive ear when in the kitchen, and it can’t be too much of a surprise when you hear movement out in the garage. The ring of salt has long been discarded as a preventive measure, but that old cheap chair has worked well on its own in alerting you to any stirring. 

You stand there listening as the whining of the kettle rises and rises. Slowly, you turn the stove knob back to low, and the hiss of the kettle dies out with a sad little whimper. 

When you peer through the doorway, caped by that uncomfortable feeling of voyeurism, he’s standing. The light of the garage makes his appearance no less startling, still towering and angular, all sharp edges. There is a weight to his stance, not just of his hulking suit and its mechanisms, but as if he’s bearing some spectacular, unseen load that renders the simple act of standing terribly laborious. He’s staring at your workbench, ears up and alert. His clawed hand hovers over the radio, the pointed metal digits extended and curled slightly. Ridged silver talons glimmer, a series of little fine scythes. It almost appears like he’s feeling the warmth of a radiator. From its speakers bleeds the joyful clamor of children and playful arcade jingles. Initially, you have to assume he’s moving to switch the station, maybe even crush the device entirely, but quickly the connection glimmers in your mind. The sounds must be familiar. At one point, it must’ve been the regular soundscape of his everyday, encapsulated in a little box and now recited through its speaker.

You’re not sure if his apparent reminiscing is charming, but a part of you feels for him nonetheless. Whether or not you could imagine such an existence as desirable, it was his reality for so long, possibly since inception. Maybe it’s that hot, fuzzy film cast by your fever that keeps you from recognizing the rancor that someone sober would have to recognize rolling off of him; it’s a chill so thick it sinks instantly to the floor and creeps down into the cracks like a surge of oil. You just shiver it away. 

You step aside like you’re giving him privacy and press your back to the wall next to the door, listening. The clamor of playing children and the squeak of shoes on playplace tubing fades to a segment of music and resuming narration. Even here you can make out the dialogue of the droning narrator, tinny and coarse through the speaker, but the garage itself is silent.

You think you have to be exaggerating how long you’re standing there. You hear the water slow back to stillness in the kettle, hear the rhythmic tick tick tick of the kitchen clock assume its place, watch the bubbles dissipate, and when you turn to look at the stove clock, it has indeed been four minutes. 

The distinct and undeniable sound of a long, dry inhale creeps across the open air of the doorway and instantly chills the kitchen like a plume of thick, fat fog. Hot, acrid air unrolls onto your neck, and though blistery, sets goose flesh blooming fast across the skin there. 

You don’t scream, but it doesn’t matter–as you move to lunge away from the door, you feel the wood of the floor slip from beneath your feet and air takes its place as you tumble violently forward. The kitchen mat placed a little too far forward to have stabilized your steps at least works to pad your fall slightly, although your knees face the brunt of the wood boards and the sound of your fall still resonates with embarrassing force, nearly thunderous in the silence of the kitchen. You scramble forward, fingers sliding pointlessly in search of purchase over the glossy wood and finally finding stability on the fabric of the mat so that you can push yourself upwards. The door is empty. Steps recede inside somewhere beyond where you can see.

Three short huffs sound from the garage, like some sort of strangled animal braying, but it’s not quite pained–it’s very much a laugh. He’s laughing at you. He laughs not like a hyena but like some hellish dead thing, like his lungs are tight and rotting and his throat blisters with decomposition. But it is a laugh, undeniably. 

Oh, so he has a sense of humor.

You stand, little recognition for the throbbing of your knees as the pain makes its initial round. No other sounds come and the house stands quietly again. You laugh, a careful and controlled, small sound, chuckling through tiny whimpers as you massage your calves. 

Is this bonding?

That night, you pull up your chair again and eat dinner beside him. You hope, through the establishment of this little ritual, that you can start sawing away the tension that remains. Not even vaguely is this what you envisioned 

You suppose you’ve given up on taking a break, your most persistent condition; you just can’t set things down, unfinished work haunts you insistently, worse than any phantoms patrolling your house.

You’re just that excited, it seems. You’ve long foregone the camera–the situation’s just changed far too much, and now you have to consider some atypical intricacies, most centrally, the matter of recording something that is to some metric living but unable to communicate in most standard manners. You had attempted an ouija board a little earlier on, but it was never so much as touched, laid out a set of block letters that were similarly ignored, and even a pencil and paper–it was dented and creased with the application of pressure but did not bear a single mark of graphite. 

You did have to wonder how much of his refusal to employ these tools was just out of defiance or disapproval over their often childlike nature. Your not taking him seriously has appeared to be the biggest contrivance so far, so today you go back to the basics. 

That fat sack of salt had come in handy for cooking, especially with all the pasta you’d been relying on for quick, weekday dinners, but today you retrieve it to revisit its initial purpose. 

The rabbit thing watches unblinkingly as you, on your knees, shuffle about the garage floor to lay down a blanket of salt. Powder chalk, a brief alternative you hoped could save you some money, was also refused by him, and only made an even more troublesome mess to clean up after going undisturbed for two days. He seems to insist on being a hole in your wallet. Patience appears to be the name of the game for now, and though he is so uncommunicative, he at least makes it clear what he will and won't permit. Even in the absence of speech, these lines are drawn stark and distinct. 

When you’ve amassed a solid foundation of salt, you go back over just with your hands and smooth out the pile with your palms, raking it to form one wide rectangle. You stand and wipe your hands off on your pants, depositing a fair amount of salt onto the fabric in the process.

You pull up the battered stool and take a seat, smoothing your hands up and down your thighs as you think. Even as these questionings become routine, the silence that backdrops them only gets so much more comfortable. 

“Evenin’,” you begin, tilting side to side in your seat.

“I hope some questions are okay. We’re doing the salt again, ‘cause it seems like you prefer it, right?” 

You already know there will be no response when you look up to his teeth-bared face.

You ask, looking back to the floor, if he was always alive, or aware, or possessed, or containing some measure of consciousness. The question had been itching more incessantly at you as you’d been browsing photos from his early years on stage and intact, a likeness that remains distantly but is so trace that it’s hard to imagine this is the same creature. He bears a degree of devastation and disrepair that is not wholly explained by years of neglect, too sinister. Yes, you have to imagine his location saw some volume of looters after its closure, but any person knowledgeable on animatronics would have taken him rather than a handful of parts. Had his makeover at the haunt really done so much damage?

You look up again. The question is too open-ended. You revise it.

“What’s your earliest memory?” you ask, leaning in. You want to continue with “when did this start?” but it sounds clinical, like you’re probing him about the details of some ailment and not this miraculous instance of improbable life. It’s no disease, you don’t believe, but it is your search for answers that has you questioning the chronology of the beast’s consciousness; for all you know it may have been some insidious pestilence, just incubating throughout the years. 

You decide that you’ve worded it fine enough and in a way that can be answered much more simply. He’s not dumb by any means, but communication is limited and even more so by his selectiveness in what methods he approves or rejects. Some days you get no responses at all even when using approaches he had previously used, like the salt. 

You leave quietly and shut the door behind you. By now this song and dance is familiar, and while the time between your question and his response has become increasingly elapsed every time around, it’s still a frustratingly long affair for an answer that may not amount to anything meaningful at all. You’d be more forgiving if you figured he was shy, but that’s far from the truth. He’s smart, he toys with you, maybe you’d even call him strategic, but it’s utterly false to attribute such innocuous words to him.

You have to remember that.

Again you find yourself standing in your kitchen like you’re a stranger. This glimmer of (strained) companionship has only reiterated how profoundly lonely you are; here, you stand, giving the robot his privacy but fervently awaiting his response. You’re not old, you’re not past your prime, the dating scene is by no means dry, what are you doing?

Somewhere in the house, your phone buzzes. You pass into the living room and see the spray of artificial orange light from its screen on an end table, grabbing it on your way down the hall and scrolling past a notification, catching Dale’s name before the message dissolves into your home screen. You try to swipe back to read the message but it’s already gone, and so instead you navigate to call for a taxi.

A twenty-minute ride through 9:00 pm empty roads set to the worst, most oppressive silence you’ve felt in years, worse than dinners in your cramped apartment, you at the kitchen table, boyfriend at the couch.

You push past the clouded glass doors of a closet-sized bar on the side of town you’ve never ventured to, too far off from your usual commute to work and the direction of your usual stores to care to explore. It’s a brick of a building and mostly barren on its exterior, marked only by a towering neon pink sign of a pinup lady swigging beer (which would’ve given it a nice, retro charm if the motif didn’t start and stop there). 

You don’t care to take in the details of the interior; it’s another one of those over-perfumed, modern minimalist fake-leather couch lounges with no real soul or character. Its menu offers the standard array of American drinks and unadventurous cocktails. None of this matters, just that there are people, there are voices other than  your own, and that you’re out of the house. 

Your eyes are already bleary before your first drink. You just keep thinking about how you haven’t done this since college as you finally force down the first one, somehow equally biting and bitter as much as it is overwhelmingly sweetened. It sticks to your throat all the way down and has a lingering coat, like cough syrup. 

It’s enough to get you dancing, conservatively, off to the side of the mass of most bar-goers. You eye the crowd, scanning faces in search of someone equally lonesome. It takes another downed glass, this time something strong and malty, for you to approach someone. You barely meet their gaze but match their feet, drawing forward and back with their own body. Light bleeding from overhead provides a mask that offers unfamiliar confidence. Another drink helps you feel invincible. You can’t describe its taste, lost as soon as it leaves your tongue, and neither can you remember the person's face. Your dancing is sloppier and looser

They shoulder their way past other patrons, and nervous to show too much interest, you fumble your phone out from your pocket and check the time. 9:40 pm on a weeknight. Your cough is gone but congestion still lines your ribs like collecting detritus. Work demands an early wake, and you envision your rabbit friend drawing lonely spirals in the tablet of salt in the garage. 

You throw back another drink, not even knowing the name of this one, just knowing that it’s slick and salty, hoping it’ll burn away the remains of your apprehension. It persists stubbornly, a furious growth of mold on your subconscious, resistant to the sting of alcohol. Your dancing is sloppier and looser.

You wade your way back over to the bar, sliding past bumping bodies to take an unoccupied seat at the counter. This time you just ask for a water, room temperature, and nurse on it as you wait for your nerves to settle. Somehow your eyes meet theirs multiple times. Again you reach for your phone to look busy, swiping past an empty lock screen, your stomach fried with nervousness all the while.

You thought you could do this, but when you see them work their way in your direction you’re quickly clearing the last inch chug of water from your glass and cramming your wallet and phone back into your bag.

It’s only 10:10 when the taxi pulls up to the battered curb and you shuffle your way into the back. You slur an address that you have to go back over in your head even though it’s your own, and the taxi stirs to life and rattles forward. He’s driving slow enough that you’d get fussy if you were sober, but right now every crawl to a halt at a stop sign and careful turn right feels dizzying.

It’s weird to come home so late, dark enough that the porch light can be fully appreciated as you stumble up the driveway. You wouldn’t think you were such a lightweight, but an occasional can of beer to accompany Friday dinners hadn’t done much to reinforce your tolerance.

It’s not too late, you can salvage some sleep and drown your morning hangover in water and espressos. It really has been a while since you lived like this, and you feel dysfunctional—you just can’t let yourself relax, it seems.

You want to shower to rinse away the bar stickiness, but the struggle of just unlacing and shimmying out of your shoes makes the idea of lurching to the bathroom, undressing, and showering seem like an entire ordeal. You brush your teeth quickly and dose the alcohol bubbling in your belly with more glasses of water that now taste like menthol. You shed your coat and decide that’s enough to get comfortable, flopping down on your bed and tugging the sheets just over your shoulders.

You toss plenty before you find a position that you decide is passable. Closed eyes don’t block the bleeding of color that shouldn’t be there from blossoming on the back of your eyelids. You feel like you’re being tilted this way and that, and subconsciously, you shift with it, trying to stay centered on your bed as the scene of your bedroom swivels slowly on a lopsided track.

The sheets burn with a nearly venomous prickle. It’s too hot. Fussing, you kick off the covers to free yourself of their oppressive heat. 

You breathe out hard and stand up, marching through pins and needles to your bedroom window. The air that rushes through when you struggle it open is equally warm and dry.

Too hot. 

You’re then pushing back out of your bedroom and trailing down the hall. You pop open the hallway closet to fetch a blanket and cram it as compactly as you can under your arm. It trails behind you still as you walk to the kitchen, catching on your heels. You retrieve a throw pillow and tuck that under the other arm, and then you’re trodding down the stairs into the garage and throwing out the blanket onto the concrete floor. You bend down to sit on your knees and from there lay fully, pushing the pillow somewhere comfortable beneath your head. The garage is cold and dark in a way that would otherwise be uninviting but is heavenly on your heated skin and blooming headache.

“Hi,” you say through heavy, nearly numb lips. You watch his silhouette, looking for movement in the dark but knowing you’ll get no acknowledgement. You never do. You shuffle and draw your blanket further up your body and up to your chin. The distant orchestra of crickets croak somewhere outside. It must be far, but right now it sounds like angry rainfall raging on the roof.

You murmur some goodnight to your rabbit friend and let your eyes flutter closed. How long ago were you sleeping with your door locked and a knife under your mattress? A few drinks had seemed to render it a distant whisper. 

Mint oil swirls with grenadine in your stomach. The cold floor seeps through the fabric of your blanket mattress, but it’s quite the pleasant chill to diffuse the heat of your drunkenness. You let yourself groan in relief.

You hear the long, scraping strides of metal talons but apparently can’t make yourself care enough to pry open your eyes, thickly sealed closed by drowsiness. The air around you gets colder, and then frigid and heavy. You mumble, drool pooling on one corner of your lips. You should go turn on the fan, but it’s all the way in the corner, and you’re not sure your legs are ready to stand.

You almost swat away the hand that drags down your arm. You have to hiss when its fingers dig suddenly down and draw shallow lines of prickling blood. 

“Cut it,” is all you can spit, not very impassioned, nuzzling further into your pillow. 

It’s not a dream. His breath is hot, not the frigid fog of cold it is in your dreams. You don’t care all that much, gently wiping the scratches that rise on your exposed arm, murmuring something pained but ultimately unbothered.

You lay there in a limbo of death’s hot air and the cold of the unheated garage. When his heat becomes unbearable, you finally turn over and come to stand on wobbly legs. Of course, he’s in his chair and unmoved. You pass by, eyes squinted and adjusting, searching for the fan.

You nearly jump when you feel something grainy and coarse warp under your feet, pulling back suddenly like you’ve stepped on glass. The pearly-blue glimmer of light speckling the floor beneath you makes you think so as well, but there’s no pain as you lift your foot to examine it. Salt. 

Now you wobble over to the garage door to feel for the light switch. It clicks and the overhead light blinks on with an electric hum. From there you walk back over to the pile, rubbing at your eyes against the glare of fluorescents. Salt. The salt, you remember. It’s still clinging to the fabric of your blue jeans from your escapades with it earlier today.

You almost rush past him, and indeed, you can see immediately that it’s been rearranged. Making out the picture he’s assembled is the much more troubling task, because he’s opted not for words but for some sort of simplified illustration, perhaps applaudable despite its quality just for the use of such a precarious medium.

You walk around it clockwise to see if any other angle offers a more coherent interpretation, but they’re all equally nonsensical. You round back around to where he’d face the salt from his seat and suppose this is your best guess.

A chessboard, or tile, or something checkered, slanted so that it ends at a horizon line. That you can decipher easily, but the rest is lost in large, swooping lines. A body of water or an oil spill, something stretching outwards from your feet like a large splatter. An arrangement of seemingly random rectangles on the sky or wall above where the checkered tile ends, with even less coherent scribbles contained inside. It represents something, but you have to wonder if it’s deliberately packed, a little visual goose chase for you. You don’t know the extent of his vocabulary, but he knows words and has offered you fragments of sentences before. It’s odd. There’s fury in the hurried lines he’s drawn.

It takes too long for you to realize that what you initially assumed to be the plane of a chessboard is likely the checkered tile of the Fazbear Pizzeria, a staple across all its locations. With that foundation, you can presume this is the interior of one of its facilities, and so the sky is more so a wall and the squares that decorate it in some manner of decor, posters or drawings. The rest is no more than chicken scratch.

Something else burns a hole deep in your stomach, and it’s not the settling gin and tonic.

You crane your head to look at him and wonder if your eyes are crazed and your irises swollen. You mumble a question in reference to his drawing. 

Your hand goes up to cradle the scratched arm, where little beads of blood fatten into bright red pearls, finally acknowledging the sting there. And still, somehow, you go to turn on the fan, angle it somewhere in the direction of your makeshift bed, and stumble back over to fall into a sudden and all-encompassing sleep.

MAX THOMPSON JR. / THE HILLBILLY

Obsessive

Max is not stupid, he knows how to read the people around him, and he’s especially mindful of the way disdain and resentment manifest in people's eyes. He never stopped caring, he never developed a resilience to it like he maybe should have for a lifetime of mistreatment. He’s fatigued of the ritual, the hanging, writhing cows, the buzz of flies in blistering summer, the laughing–cruel and dry of sympathy, but then so genuine and warm when heard from the next room over. He needs you to prove he’s not unlovable, he doesn’t need it to be genuine so long as you can sell the act, so long as he doesn’t have to feel that despicable sting when someone looks at him with pity. Play house with him, call him by his name because he knows he has one. He loves the sound of yours, your introduction to him is seared deep into every surface in his mind, so say his.

He thinks you might be the first person to recognize his fear, his lost wandering, something no one else could seem to discern, already hateful or already afraid. Max can be good, he knows how to sit still, how to stay out of the way and out of view. He’s ranked on the lower side in danger because his desires are quite simple and even standard–somewhere safe to stay, food on the table, a lover, a name and a reputation of his own making, not of someone else’s verdict.

Danger 2.5/5

SALLY SMITHSON / THE NURSE

Delusional, Isolating

Her time working in the asylum left her washed intensely in delusion. She believes, though her method is cruel and unforgiving, her intentions are good-natured. The same will apply for any romantic feelings. She’s very much of the mind that she knows best and that it’s her duty to keep you from being led astray. 

It’s impossible to reason with her mindset, soiled with delirium, and she’ll shut down any arguments with the accusation that you’re the delusional one; she only wants to help. You’re callous, pushing her away. She’s good at orchestrating her emotions to manipulate others, a surprisingly honed skill for someone in a position expected to prescribe care in a high-intensity environment. That persona of hers is equally mastered and refined, and when displays of fanatical emotion don’t work to her advantage, Sally can switch to cold and collected on a dime. She has this nurturing voice of reason that’s sinisterly good at making you second-doubt yourself. Even with her own sharp, calculated tongue, it doesn’t mean your own doubting, resistant words don’t get to her, inching and worming about to find an opening inside. There’s guilt there, festering behind a face that’s fixed and serious. But she loves you, she trusts you, she believes in you wholly and unwaveringly, why can’t you do the same for her? You’re in good hands, after all.

DANGER: 4/5

MICHAEL MYERS / THE SHAPE

Possessive, Obsessive

Obsessive should be no surprise; whatever drives him is absolutely unearthly and to find yourself his new fixation is an especially cruel fortune. You’ve got no leverage on him, no true escape that’s not just a temporary hindrance. There’s no emotions for you to work with, no semblance of a goal, no sense of human morality–he kills as unperturbed as any apex predator does, a symptom of their nature that can’t and shouldn’t be compared to any human notions of ethics.

You can never recreate the image of a real relationship with Michael, what is between you two is unlabelable and surreal. He keeps you around, keeps you alive, but frequently seems to reconsider his decision to–you’ll never be allowed the illusion of safety. No matter how compliant you make yourself, how muted and pliable, you’re traversing a minefield quite blind. You can make all the seemingly right choices and still inflict him with some sudden, wordless rage. 

He’s hard to figure out. He keeps his intentions unknowable, preferring that power over you. Feeds from your unease, and thrives off of displays of fear. He wants a reaction, that much is obvious, and no means are excessive to get that out of you. It is unavoidable that he will eventually tire of you; when you spend so long jabbing at your food, it gets cold. When that time comes, he’ll rid of you lethally. 

Danger: 5/5

HERMAN CARTER / THE DOCTOR

Lucid, Manipulative

Well aware his feelings could quickly become dangerous, though doesn’t find himself caring an awful lot. He has way too much fun messing with you, making you doubt yourself, him, others. I can’t imagine any romantic feelings between the two of you could ever vaguely replicate a functional relationship, even if mutual–he’ll never play the role of a caring partner, he enjoys his position above you far too much. This is just another iteration of chess, only you two are the only pieces on the board, and you’re a cornered pawn and he’s the queen. You can always move one space forward, but that scarcely matters when the entire playing field is his. 

He can’t tarnish his name any further, it’s already blistered and seared with misdeed, so there’s really nothing left to bind him to a moral code (not that he has ever, at any point, had any loose semblance of one).

Danger: 5/5

ANNA / THE HUNTRESS

Possessive, Isolating

Anna seems fundamentally unable to recognize fear. It’s not like she hasn’t experienced it firsthand, so why can’t she glean it from the horrified faces of others? She hates how you hide like the rest of them. She feels so much frustration, boiling and foaming in her blood, hot with fury but confused. You’re safe within the walls of the cabin, gifted her most luxurious furs, allowed to wander the halls freely even to the areas she restricted previous captives from venturing into. She feeds you even through the winters when rations must be stretched out weeks, she lets you bathe in the water she would’ve reserved for her own drinking. She doesn’t get what you see out the window, in the desolate expanse of snow and dead undergrowth. Anna starts to wonder if you harbor some small, flickering desire for death, perhaps unconscious but unshakable, the same way beloved pets dash from their safe homes into the vastness of the outside, hostile world. At times she thinks about leaving you out in the unforgiving deluge of snow to wander barefoot through the woods that she knows well are rife with wartime activity. She wouldn’t enjoy it, no, in fact the idea makes her prickle with anxiety, but some lessons are taught by uncompromising measures. 

Once or twice, Anna drew open the cabin doors and let you look out at the grassless, miserable landscape outside. She’d wait there, staring expectantly at you, daring you to go. You never do, you know there’s no fruitful survival out there, and this is her confirmation. It’s safest here. She’ll supply for you, she’ll stroke your hair at night and weave you sad, lopsided dolls. Around your bed, a nest of blankets and tanned pelts, she lays gifts like offerings: carved animals, glittering beads, embroidered fabrics, and any bones she finds especially pretty. They collect and collect, untouched. Before long, they form walls around your little sanctuary. Perhaps your fear appears as timidness to her, or maybe she’s past the point of caring.

Danger: 4.5/5

BUBBA SAWYER / THE CANNIBAL

Dependent, Possessive

To a point, he’s delusional, but he can recognize you’re unwilling. That horrible, paralyzing fear you wear on your face is so alike the dread that kept him loyal to his family and helped him stomach the shedding of blood that is so intrinsic to their practice. With no positive relationships or notions of positive attention, the idea of a dynamic not based in fear is entirely alien to him. To him, some level of anxiety regarding the other party is normal in a majority of circumstances, so he’s not quite prepared on how to navigate the ordeal of romancing you. He comes to treat you like a frightened, injured bird, wrongly trapped indoors–he’s afraid to physically handle you in any way, and reacts to your fear with his own. His reactionary nature can be used to your benefit, though, as he’ll also reflect your calmer composure and is responsive to attempts to soothe him. 

He is one of the few killers that you have a fair amount of leverage over, which you can utilize both through negative and positive reinforcement. He’s not quite predictable, being susceptible to sharp and sudden mood swings with no obvious trigger, but once you’ve gotten more familiar with his mannerisms you can respond accordingly and deescalate most situations. With some work, I do believe you could make strides to a more balanced dynamic.

Danger: 2/5

AMANDA YOUNG / THE PIG

Lucid, Manipulative 

Fairly coherent regarding her emotions, though this regulation never translates into her actions, which are twisted by impulse and anxieties. Unintentionally incredibly manipulative, will very quickly turn to self-destructive exploits to gain your sympathy and convince you to stay. She doesn’t recognize this as deceitful, this is just behavior that has followed her through every relationship. Amanda really has no solid bonds to model this one after; even John, who she had always revered and cared for so deeply, left little of a good impression of interpersonal relations. In fact, this is where a lot of her codependency stems from, and it’s a particularly troublesome weed to extinguish entirely, always some roots remaining deeper down in the soil. Eventually, Amanda stops caring if you’re only sticking around out of a feeling of necessity. If you ever show intent to leave, though, she’d panic. She just can’t conceive a life without you now that she’s met you, and even the terror that comes with imagining a scenario like such is enough to drive her to extremes, just like much of her life has been defined by. 

She’s seen so many people go, and quite a number have been by her own hands, so she’s not ready to loosen her grip on you. Amanda doesn’t have to burn all her bridges, doesn’t have to dig a spiraling grave—she’ll have you.

Danger: 3/5

RIN YAMAOKA / THE SPIRIT

Dependent, Manipulative, Lucid

Another case of unintentional manipulation. On the verge of lucidity, but blinded by the hunger for comfort and desperate to chase the stability you offer her. If she feels you’re losing interest, may also fall back on harmful habits, though herself isn’t certain if it’s a cry for recognition or a method of escapism. She’s a mess of emotions, constantly, and keeping up with ebbing and waning of her mood is maddening—you’ll just never act how she seems to need. Horrified of losing you, and it’s very clear that’s the case, however she tries to subdue such feelings. Becomes incredibly reliant on you very quickly. Fixates on any acts of kindness–this is her attempt to pull herself free from the seas of rage she’s let herself bathe in for so long. There is no malicious intent in her actions, she’s just simply a hurricane of intense emotions and somehow you’ve found yourself in her path.

It’s important to remember that she longs most for normalcy, and even when her efforts seem misguided, and are, there’s no malice to be found in them.

Danger: 1.5/5

FRANK MORRISON / THE LEGION

Possessive, Manipulative 

Possessive through and through, and given that it’s Frank, he's manipulative too. He can play it cool for long, much longer than many may give him credit for–he’s not all hotheaded and isn’t steered solely by emotion, though it may look like this from afar. The time leading up to any romantic escalations is disarmingly normal, because yes, he does truly long for a normal relationship and for positive attention and affirmation traded freely. What keeps him from these chances at stability is that he needs control. He needs the upper hand, he needs dominance over the playing board, he always needs to be the deciding factor in any exchange. Over your relationship, you’ll find yourself more and more restricted; who you talk to, where you go. He’s intensely against you socializing outside of the Legion, who he trusts immensely and sometimes relies on to keep you in check (that is, keeping an eye on you and ensuring you are estranged to only their circle). The others have already cultured such a distrust of outsiders that all your other social outlets are quick to be snuffed out.

There’s not terribly much left for Frank–the foster care system failed him almost ritualistically, churning him through a lineup of underprepared, inexperienced households, and now he's long past the age that he’s spared any sympathy. There’s only apathy left for him, and so as long as he has the loyalty of the other Legion members, and enough of a grasp over you, he’s fine burning all other remaining bridges. He wants to destroy it all with you.

Danger: 4/5

JULIE KOSTENKO / THE LEGION

Possessive, Isolating

Can be likened to Frank, but will never entirely trust you around the rest of the Legion; she loves them so, but is dazed in her worries of losing you. Control is not just a desire but practically a need, the only thing to quiet her restlessness when away from you. 

Slowly, she inserts herself into every aspect of your life, ensuring her presence reaches all the areas of your mind and that the association is unavoidable. She wants complete monopoly over your thoughts, crowbarred into every recess. She wants her image burned into the back of your eyes, and her goal to inject herself inseparably into your life comes to be a game to her. 

Julie wants to watch you shut down. It’s bad, she knows, but that’s all she can see in herself—the good has never been recognized, so why try to backtrack now? She knows that she’s a perpetually descending spiral, and sees no point in course-correcting, so it’s you that’ll accompany her into these extreme depths.

Danger: 4/5

JOEY CADOGEN / THE LEGION

Lucid, Possessive

His descent is a gradual, aching one. He watches passively as he careens into devastating obsession, worsening but with no will to stop it. Like Julie, he adores the family he’s established in the Legion, but can’t stand the possibility of losing you to one of them. It would be more personally crushing, so he figures he’d rather be safe than sorry. He can wait like they can’t, too impatient and all gnashing teeth, caffeine and teenage anger. He can be calculated, he can sit and watch, that’s what he’s always had above the rest of them. He’s no dog, and Joey is fine with a little bit of required set-up: he’s got the same restless spirit as the entirety of the Legion, but he can bite his tongue and reject moves for instant gratuity. The prize at the end of the long haul is infinitely sweeter, and so he plays his cards carefully for the first half of your interactions, strategic in the information he reveals and what you do and don’t see of him. He’s sweet, he’s serious, and he’s forward in a way similarly-aged peers seem unable to be. That’s what makes his later 180 particularly nasty. 

Suddenly, his cruelty is profound and you now have to scavenge for sympathy where he had given it freely. He doesn’t have the same stomach for brutality that Julie and Frank seem to have, but he knows how to be ruthless in words and a disapproving sneer. Danger: 3.5/5

SUSIE LAVOIE / THE LEGION

Obsessive, Dependent

Lucid to a degree; she’s never been in a relationship herself, and the possibility of a stable one now is unfeasible in these circumstances, but she’s witnessed enough to understand there’s something profusely wrong with her feelings. Susie lived much of her life in the passenger seat of her body, however, watching herself dig herself deeper and deeper—she collects bad habits like precious stones and has never been especially helpful in getting herself out of these pathways. Even her attempts to gain a semblance of control were ultimately motivated by the desire to belong; she’s always been following behind someone else. This had been Julie for a good while, but now that that source of attention has thinned to a creeping dribble, you’re her new dealer. She can’t be passive about it anymore, she’s done that already with Julie and had her world torn apart in the process. It was a horrible slow burn watching Julie abandon her and the bond she thought was unshakeable; it felt like someone had stabbed her, wriggled the knife around inside, and then smeared the wound with a fistful of salt. She will never let that happen again.

Eventually, her mood will come to depend heavily on yours, and how you treat her. Praise and displays of affection make her day, though alternatively, something as simple as a drop in tone can ruin her entirely. She’s disastrous and constantly so, from mascara-blackened tears to grinding teeth in just a matter of hours, and this becomes a daily ritual. Day to day you feel progressively subdued and flushed of energy, siphoned out of wounds in your body that you can’t locate. Your resolve thins and thins, and yet Susie seems livelier than ever.

Danger: 3/5

ADIRIS / THE PLAGUE

Possessive, Delusional

Adiris is not delusional in the sense of wrongly believing you return her feelings, but instead, ignores the possibility entirely. She’s banished the notion from her mind, naively trusting that you love her wholly and unquestioningly. It will take time for her to view you as equal and acknowledge you have needs separate from her; she prefers the bliss of complete control over you. She finds comfort in her ignorance, and would never want to trade that for the much more bitter reality. 

She still holds on to that eroding hope that she’s helping people, that she’s helping you. Even as the blood rises further beneath her feet, stretches out to consume the horizon, the Entity whispers cruel reassurances. Salvation and cleanliness are so close now, and she wants to be the one to walk you there with her. Everything she’s doing is done out of devotion–her intentions are only pure, purged of all wicked filth that characterizes others' affection. Her strain of love is untouched and undiluted. If you can’t see that, maybe you aren’t as clean as she hoped. Danger: 4/5

DANNY JOHNSON / THE GHOST FACE 

Lucid, Possessive, Manipulative 

The basket case of the bunch, he’s a tumultuous, unpredictable concoction of all the archetypes, cycling through the symptoms like an arsenal of weapons.

He is absolutely aware of the unhealthy nature of his emotions, though thrives off the high of it. He knows already that he’s likely incapable of a healthy, longform relationship, as much as he’d pursued those in his teenage years. He’s lucid, but any guilt, if present, does little to discourage him. 

Like any addiction,as time goes on, he needs more and more to reach that pleasure again, until he’s wrung you dry, left you empty and disjointed, and no longer sees a use in you. This can span much longer than you might predict, even years. He needs his fix, needs to sate himself, but he’s good at the waiting game. There’s something just so uniquely thrilling about living a double life and then slowly letting them overlap, letting himself be careless, letting you get suspicious, until it’s undeniable that he is the same masked terror he so obsessively reports on. Views you as a beloved item, and treats you as he pleases, which is dictated by his mood (which itself fluctuates sharply). Threats are abundant but sporadic; you could be having a nice dinner and he’d flip out a knife and direct it at your neck. You’ll never even be teased with the possibility of normalcy.

Danger: 5/5 KAZAN YAMAOKA / THE ONI

It’s easy to cast him as a man who knows only violence, whose language is wrath and who’s unknowable moral code must be transcribed in blood, but there’s a human in there. He’s lived a short life as a man, and that part of him persisted even under his detested moniker as the Yamaoka Oni.

He knows he’s not a creature without fault, but this is not a symptom of some unrevealed sliver of humanity. It is his most undoing trait that he can recognize his own corruption, because that’s all he sees as left of himself. There’s no backtracking for the road he’s assumed, just the path ahead as it spirals and spirals downward. Kazan knows he will not right a long, gore-drenched lifetimes of wrongs by loving one human gently and genuinely. Him sparing you does not erase the backdrop of bodies, rows of rows of beaten, purpled bodies, that will forever silhouette his life. To him, you are equally terrible to see him for what he is and love him, and he supposes he should only love someone every bit as reprehensible as himself. It’s a fine arrangement then: you’ll love him as he is, abhorrent and damned, and he’ll love you, illogical and misguided.

Your goal should not be to pacify him; he knows that voice so well, the small, docile one, all apologetic and insincere–it grates like the squealing and hissing of grinding gears. It’s best for you to adopt a similar hard exterior to his and play the role he expects of you. 

Danger: 5/5

CALEB QUINN / THE DEATHSLINGER

Possessive, Lucid

Does not exactly view you as an object or possession as much as he views you as just his. He doesn’t have the words for it either, and it will certainly never be clarified for you.

All things considered, he’d be one of the more humane killers. He’s had a lifetime of mistreatment, and so he’s very staunchly adamant about his ideas of respect, as contradictory as it can be among the bloodshed and agony intrinsic to the mechanics of the entity's realm.

When Caleb squeezed the trigger of his Redeemer and watched the spear plunge into the chest of his former boss, he knew the course of his life was going to change–he’d been surprised in the end that he hadn’t been sentenced to death, and so everything following was relatively unplanned. That is to say, a relationship was never in the books, and so all of this is new territory. He’s learned though, had to go through the ringer and back to really get it in his skull, that everything dear must be held close. Lock and key aren’t enough, either, but he knows a watchful eye and ready trigger finger will. He does not ever want to look down the barrel at you, but his life is one that often forces him to extremes. He doesn’t have to act as your warden: assurances of your loyalty and promises of a simple, domestic life keep him sated for the time being. 

Danger: 3/5

PYRAMID HEAD / THE EXECUTIONER 

Possessive

He’s hard to pin, given how out of place he is anywhere outside of James’ psyche. In the scenario that he is a personal manifestation, designated to dispense punishment upon the behalf of internalized guilt, I imagine he’d function much like he does for James; bound to you, he follows you relentlessly, but his fixation is one that transcends his purpose as a deliverer of penance. 

It’s important to remember that he acts on no agenda–yes, this makes him hard to predict, but maybe there is some reassurance to be found in his lack of malice. How deeply can you resent the lion for eating the gazelle? Eventually you have to recognize that human concepts of morality just can’t be applied to such an animal, and Pyramid Head is the same. Unfortunately, this does mean there’s little point in trying to reason with him. There’s no rationale to concede with, he’s simply guided by a voice that calls in a tone you can’t perceive. It’s not even instinct that drives him, just a grave understanding that he is to complete his duty. With your introduction, that’s changed.

To him, you belong to him and in return, he is to protect you. This devotion he’s plunged into is the formation of a new contract, in which his existence is now yours. If he failed that task, the only reasonable response would be punishment. Similarly, if you exhibit a lack of faith, he’ll supply discipline as he sees fit. There’s no way out once you take that plunge; a beast that can’t perish and a realm that won’t let you die sets up an eternal commitment. 

Danger: 3/5

SADAKO YAMAMURA / THE ONYRO 

Obsessive, Dependent

You may be the first person to look at her without repulsion, pity, or terror—can you blame her so quickly for her fixation on the first instance of positive attention? The feeling is so alien it startles her at first, too strong and all-encompassing, it’s almost sickening. It hits her too hard and suddenly, the impact is like a rogue wave beating down on her and flushing away the sand from under her. The air around her turns septic with hatred wherever she goes, of course she gravitates towards the sweet smell of your emanating optimism. In your presence there is a peace and stillness that she knows well is scarce elsewhere, and she’s so starved for it, she wants to hold it tangibly, wants to robe herself in it. Sadako thinks she might just wither away in your absence, an active rot that grows like algae when she finds herself too far for comfort from you.

She won’t ever confess, not in any true or traditional manner, but she very much hopes and imagines you can recognize her affection. It does wade off her, like a weighty fog, but it’s a sense of love that’s deeply and clearly warped. It offers no comfort, only a chill and a thrumming in the heart.

She’s tired of rejection and averted eyes—if you can’t take her as she is, then she’s not above ridding of you entirely. 

Danger: 3/5

TARHOS KAVOCS / THE KNIGHT

Possessive 

There is so much violence and vitriol in the world, running over it freely in sheets of bitter, hateful rain. Tarhos stopped lamenting this long ago—he had to, otherwise he’d be infinitely miserable, he could mourn and gripe away each year at the cruelty his wartorn world spits out like a machine. You’re a wrench in it all; he could write you off as naive, simple, unjaded, unspoiled. He’s not quite sure why your optimism, hardy and resistant through it all, doesn’t anger him, doesn't sting his mouth with the taste of resentment. He will show you, he will take your hand and ease you into the waters that he was thrust into so young. Where he had drowned, he’ll hold you afloat.

He’s not a noble lover though, nothing of his has been won through charity or acts of grace but through dogged force. He knows nothing of romance and courting, and so he sees what you two share as another transaction of blood; he spills and spills and spills the stuff for you, and is only disgusted that you’re unable to recognize his acts of servitude. Tarhos has shown his readiness. This is his nature, this is his love–if he can care for you so as you are, with only soft edges and an aversion to the unpleasantries of the world, then you can take him as he is, encrusted in gore and a legacy of cruelty.

Danger: 4/5

ADRIANA IMAI / THE SKULL MERCHANT

Obsessive, Isolating

The world is rife with unworthy people, so Adriana has cultivated quite the sharp eye for sniffing out potential and an equally quick, unforgiving assessment on who is and is not worthwhile. Worthwhile, however, is apparently unrelated to her idea of a respectable person. She wants to draw out your ambition, to isolate and pin down the fighting spirit that burns in all people, some hotter and wilder than others.

She came from very little, but that’s so distant to her now, numbed by her monopoly, her opulence, the availability of everything she could want. There’s no one left above her to look down on her; Adriana very well could look anywhere else, every which way crowded with open doors and opportunity, but it’s fun to look down and torment the littler people. It’s your resilience that seizes her attention, that defiant, undying light of yours that she could never wring out from the typical victim. It’s another chase for her, and she plays it slow and methodical. There’s no need to rush: you’re already on the chessboard. 

Adriana is certain she could earn your adoration the traditional way–she could offer you everything, and with the current state of affairs, that’s just enough for a number of people. But the talking phase, however, has never caught her interest; it’s leagues more fun to carefully coordinate and engineer your relationship. At first, it can be passed off as a series of coincidences that all possible paths appear to lead only to her, that opportunities die around you and people who were close are now so distant. The denial can’t keep you blind from the reality for forever. 

Danger: 4/5

REDACTED / THE UNKNOWN

?

Unreadable, unnamable, unknowable, you have nothing to work with when it comes to them. You’re playing chess blindfolded, and your opponent obeys no known rules or principles. Does it care for you anywhere in its twisted, bloated heart, or is it just drawn by some indeterminate force to chase you to the ends of the earth? As long as you run, it follows endlessly. No human restraints seem to apply, no need to eat or drink, stop for rest, socialize, just a supernatural drive to haunt you. You opened the door, it’s only responding.

Suddenly, nowhere is safe, what was familiar is foreign and hostile, and you’re on the move constantly. It’s the not knowing that terrorizes you so, the fact that you must doubt the voices of friends and family, that every shadow may house it—then, the only certainty is that it’s always hounding you, and you don’t know what happens when you slip up—just by a margin—and the distance is suddenly closed. 

You only know that it wants you. Your voice, it takes, your clothes it assumes, your mannerisms and quirks projected back to you. It will be you and it will have you.

Danger: ?/5

DRACULA / THE DARK LORD

Lucid, Possessive 

Dangerously composed and lethal with his rationality, he’s also quick to anger, making him a particularly insidious weapon. However impressive it is to have acquired his affection after his swearing off of the entirety of the human race, there’s no room or reason for celebration; he knows there is little purity to his love, now, and his rage is more honed and used than any affection. 

He’s not all rage, as much as he seems to be solely operated by it. There is something softer and subdued beyond the gnashing fangs and spiteful, eternally narrowed eyes. Mostly, he’s a tired man, old and weary where his undying appearance claims otherwise. He does long for a domestic life, but it’s been swamped beneath thick, blistering apathy. He’s left to pessimism and venom and knows he’ll never regain the family unit he had before and never cherished quite enough—you’ll do fine as a pet. You’re human, anyways, innately flawed and reprehensible by your very nature; you’re no exception to the rot of human essence, and he won’t expect much of you, otherwise he’d drive himself raving and delirious when you inevitably display human imperfections. 

At least he doesn’t look at you with disdain, at least he looks at you at all, and from time to time he lets you lay your head in your lap as he drags his talons down the back of your scalp.

Danger: 5/5

PORTIA MAYE / THE HOUNDMASTER

Possessive

Forced to be self-sustaining at such a young age, she’s accustomed to her solitude, if that’s even what she’d label it. Her eyes and mind are old, she’s seen the earth in its brutal entirety. 

Initially, you enrage her, ambitionless and aimless, all soft underbelly and no weathered shell. She just doesn’t care for people with no drive, the type of people unwilling to fall down continuously to learn the way to get back up and take it head on. But Portia remembers being soft, being something young and untrained in a world that seems to be so out for blood. She raised snug from his infancy, after all, from when he was something small and afraid to a loyal beast. There is a taste for blood in all living things, she’s decided, learned or taught or innate, and she knows she can get it out of you. 

She never wanted to be a thing of hate, what she did detest most was how freely it circulated in her veins, a hot boiling venom. You are a gateway, something new and precious. When she has you, there’s no true way out. Portia spent so long getting by on scraps, less than that, on the waste and spoiled fruit of earth’s most dejected region. The moment she stepped off the island, she wanted it all, everything the world could offer, and everything she’d have to plunder from it. You just happen to be the dearest crown jewel of them all.

Danger: 3.5/5

SPRINGTRAP / THE ANIMATRONIC

Possessive, Isolating

He’s hard to read, his violence seeming erratic and spontaneous, but he has his own methodology: he’s not uncalculated, contrarily, he just knows how to hide his intentions and work off of your doubt. It’s a game to him, to seesaw between placidity and sudden frenzy, just so your defenses can never comfortably lower. He has no discernible resentment and no semblance of unquenched rage, he doesn’t even appear to take any outward joy in tormenting you, simply he acts on some unknowable agenda, like he’s abiding a predetermined, animal blueprint. He’s found a new appreciation for the pained, agonized life forced on him, a supernatural life that puppets him long after he should reasonably have perished; now, his chase after you is eternal. As long as you can keep up the pace, he can’t see himself tiring of this song and dance anytime soon.

You can ask why, why you, why this, but you never get much of a response. He offers only small, strangled wheezes and a cold stare, maybe a dry, odd laugh. His nature was predetermined when that reprehensible, abhorrent soul died in his current body to gift him life he did ever not ask for. It was decided long before him that he would be horrible, and he can’t just oppose his nature. So love him as he is, unforgivable and shameful, or turn and run and he’ll always, always give chase.

He looks over his shoulder, though those flat screen-esque shades hide even the twist of muscles around his eyes that might indicate a certain emotion.

“Did you read the description?” Kurt says after a short pause. You think you’re in trouble, or maybe you missed some vital information that would’ve dictated your decision, led you to scroll past as you did most junk listings, but you’re here and you paid that pretty, pretty penny that means you’ll have to take whatever is served to you.

You give a small, sheepish shrug. “Skimmed it.”

He doesn’t seem to take offense, you imagine then that most of his buyers are similarly uncaring for his lengthy expeditions of backstory, as caringly and intensively as he lays them out.

“Well, the thing smells. Not as bad as it did, we did some serious deep cleaning, but it’s got this lingering smell of, uh, rot. Rot ‘n’ meat, maybe.”

“Dry rot?” you ask tentatively as he takes the box and carefully cranes it down to lay on the concrete floor. 

“…did you look at the pictures?” He looks at you, a little dumbfounded and perhaps offended. 

 “I did,” you confirm, but pause. It was late at night after a long shift and your eyes were bleary with sleep when you had reviewed the images on the listing, only vaguely digesting loose details.

You shake your head and he shakes his right back at you. Kurt drops to his haunches and begins unhatching a series of locks sealing the container closer. You come around to help flip them open on the other side, only stepping back to give room when he finally hauls the lid up, dropping it against the metal wall of the storage unit with a resounding, maybe ominous thud and clank.

The smell isn’t immediate, but does crawl out like a rising mist, sour and heavy. Wet carpet, definitely, but one soaked in generous helpings of blood and then washed with acetone.  

He sees you grimace and nods in stoic understanding.

“Trust me, it was worse before. The thing was sitting in a, uh, room, one boarded up, abandoned building, leaks, just marinating in decay. This is the best he’s smelt in decades.”

You can’t imagine what such a stench would entail if it smelled so horribly of death in its current state. 

You step closer to fully look at him, as awful and dilapidated as before. The yellow of his fur that you know to have at one one point been a bright, splendid yellow is now a foul, acidic looking green in a shade found nowhere in nature except for some sort of pesky mold. The wear and tear of the body is hard to attribute to his time sitting in a storage closet, abandoned or not—rats, maybe, you theorize, though the damage that splits his cavity open must’ve been a longform and continuous effort. He’s awful, it’s wonderful for you. You’re reminded again that you’re likely the only person excited about such a thing, but you don’t care—he’ll make for the most gruesome and spectacular restoration project. 

It’s already out there that you haven’t done your prior reading, so you feel fine enough doing a bit of questioning.

“What’s his deal? He’s an original, no? I can’t imagine they wouldn’t come back for him, even if they went bankrupt.”

“He fell into the hands of this awful, cheap haunt. Not true fans, not at all, did fuck all to upkeep him, didn’t know what they were working with, just knew that it was, at one point, Fazbear property.”

He waves you off when you try to help him maneuver the lumbering thing out from its steel coffin, so you again step back and let him tussle with it alone.

“The place went under before it even opened, all these problems, lighting, ventilation, fire hazards, asbestos even. They had to get rid of everything, so I got the guy for practically nothing,” Kurt continues, and then seems to jolt, looking back at you with high eyebrows. You already figured you were paying a pretty sizable upcharge just for the Fazbear brand label, so your offense at this revelation is minimal. It’s just the market–a good majority of what you're seeking out has so very little value beyond sentimentality and a fascination with the stories attached to these dejected machines. Most buyers have to figure that they’re paying a fee for novelty.  

“Oh, you’re kidding,” you say, sharp, as you eye the beast. The thing’s been kitted out for a haunted house, that’s for sure—a rotted body replaces the mechanical skeleton that would usually fill out its fabric flesh, spilling shiny, rubbery guts and torn, red muscle. What you now can see is deep, deep splatters of blood in the fur that appeared to be dark dirt stains in the photos that you had admittedly only momentarily scanned. Your impulsively had never been clearer, now an agitated, throbbing wound REPLACE. This will be one of the most demanding projects you’ve taken on.

A more careful readthrough will  be appropriate next time around, however cumbersome it feels in the moment. Apparently, a hefty price tag is easier for you to stomach than some required reading, and your heart is mightier than any senses of rationality. You’re in too deep, though, chained by some conception of obligation to tend to this mishandled, unappreciated gem of history. His transformation will be truly metamorphic. 

Despite many, many hurdles of doubt and many pauses that had you reconsidering, the thing is in your truck bed and too much of a chore to get out of it. He’s real, through and through, and so you’ll take him as is and deal with all his peculiarities and all the concerns that arise from them as they come. 

He’s silent in his haphazard spot in the back, the ragdoll he’s ended up in as a result of you and Kurt’s combined struggle to get him up and onto the bed, perhaps too heavy to be rattling around like you’d expect. The silence is uncomfortable in the kind of way a silence between an unacquainted passenger and driver is. You keep checking on him through the rear view mirror, not like he’s going anywhere, with his incredible weight. Certainly not without a hell of a racket.

“You’re a fixer-upper, for sure,” you say to him, twisting your head and shoulder out the window. You can’t see him from this angle, only the seemingly infinite path of sun-roasted asphalt behind you. You’re coming up on greener fields, the kind more lovingly manicured and tended to. Behind you disappears the barbed-wire-fenced meadows of fried, dead grass.

“I’ll treat you right, though.”

You turn back to the wheel and the road that spans ahead, laughing to yourself like a shared inside joke between the two of you. 

“I don’t know if TLC will do you any good, maybe a real good plastic surgeon, what do you think?”

You arrive home a little before sunset. You’re on your phone typing up a storm of a post for your blog as you kick open the car door and clamber out.

Your hands are shaking on the phone keyboard, spitting out a typo-ridden, relatively illegible vomit of words, of which you quickly revise to a comprehensible level and excitedly send out. 

Crazy find. It’s killing me not to be able to say yet, I don’t even think you guys would believe me, but it’ll be way worth it when I get the video up. Keep an eye out.

Your followerbase is not pitiful by any means, an audience you’re happy to say you’ve amassed from the ground up, but this could be your breakthrough, a surefire and unapologetic entry into the conversation of the big names. Some dozen folk online have gotten their hands on the newer models, the cheaper, plastic-type ones designed to be mass-produced, but one of these? You’ve struck gold. These were hellish to maintain, but that’s a part of their value–they’re tailored to the dimensions of their respective mascot actors, so not the kindest on the company’s wallet: one half of the reason they were phased out. The other half is a topic never broached by any Fazbear brand representatives, but regardless, people were quick to come to their own conclusions. You weren’t around for that buzz when they made the transition in the eighties, but the subject always snakes back around.

You set him up in your garage, the one far too small for any car marginally bigger than a buggy but perfect for your station. You like to think of it as a little nurse’s office.

“You’re going to be one hell of a project,” you say to the mechanical beast. He’s sat in a metal folding chair, all polite, like he’s a loved doll you’re setting up for a tea party. 

You don’t know where to start. You may as well tear the whole thing apart—you want that unsightly skeleton inside out, for starters, how offensive. You hope the inside mechanisms are still intact, but in this industry nothing comes in mint condition, and a fearful voice in your head tells you they probably gouged out the inside to make room for that eyesore of a dead body (though the level of detail is both commendable and disturbing). Those little metal mechanisms are archaic knowledge, and the chance to see how they work up close is thrilling. A quick closer look, stooping down to assess the concentration of the damage at his feet, shows you they are very much present, because they’re impaling the body. That’s what was keeping it upright. Fittingly morbid.

“You’re a piece of work, though, I do feel bad that I’d be undoing all this…” you ramble, tracing fingers along wide, sprawling gashes lined with false blood. 

“There’s no way they couldn’t get these out, surely. Right, buddy?” you ask him, patting his cheek.

And you’re quickly proven right. It takes some elbow grease, a bathtub full of the metaphorical stuff, but you make good progress with some furious scrubbing and many applications of hydrogen peroxide and many jugs of laundry detergent. The gentle kind, however—you’re careful to avoid anything that might contain bleach, even though you know it’ll be a whole other process in trying to revive the fur to its old, brilliant yellow. 

You work from the head down, letting the chemicals run down the torso and legs to be cleaned up as you move on. By the second hour, his head and both arms are virtually blood free, and the air smells thick of a sickeningly metallic odor. The garage door stays open to ventilate the stench of chemicals, although it's no worse than the wicked smell that must be baked into his fur. You worry there might be no cleansing of an odor like that, but your determination only flares. The results will be worth all the gallons and oceans of sweat.

Somehow, it’s past midnight when you take your first break, the building hunger initially numbed by your fixation now burning and smoldering, agitated. 

You sit at your undersized dining table, probably intended to be a patio table, eating warmed up leftovers and watching a video on someone debarking an animatronic for deep cleaning. 

Your eyes flick frequently over to the open garage door, giving you a view of your newest treasure sitting limply, back turned to you. You yourself smell of a disgusting cocktail of sweat, detergent, and the thing’s unique concoction of death. Your own shower will be nice after so much work purging him of dubious stains.

You’re running out of ways to refer to him in your head, but shamefully, you don’t know the Fazbear enterprise all that well, certainly don’t know the characters names, but you know that the rabbit was a constant character.

Before you know it, you have a name, but you’re also down a rabbit hole as you scour the Wikipedia page for the company’s extensive history, suddenly devoting an intense dedication that you couldn’t have spared for the listing’s description. You devour each tidbit of information like arcane texts. 

As you glance at him between spoonfuls of yesterday's improvised teriyaki chicken and looks downward to read off your phone, you notice how crooked he is in his chair. He was already slouching thanks to that oversized head which refused to stay upright, but now he’s on the verge of toppling over. 

Controlled by your horrible tendency to anthropomorphize, you’re about to dash out of your chair to save him from a truly unconcerning fall but are stopped by the sight of him moving. He’s about to dip off the chair but you, clear as day, catch sight of his foot swiveling so that he can fix himself back upright, straightening up to resume his previous position. 

Your fork clatters on the table. You almost empty everything you’ve just downed from your bowl.

…have the chemicals gotten to you? You had the garage door pulled up all the way back on its tracks and a fan on full blast to air him out, but clearly you weren’t careful enough and are only now feeling the delayed effects.

You sit for another good ten minutes, or approximately so, frozen in your seat as your dinner rests cooling, untouched.

The garage door in the kitchen remains firmly locked that night, only of course after you sit on the steps of your back patio, letting cold outside air purge the delirium from your system.

In the morning, you sit back in front of him once more as you cart to and from your workbench on a stool.

“You want to talk about last night?” you ask him, wetting the torso to wipe down with detergent. He stares back unresponsive. 

“Sore subject?”

Gloves snap on each hand, and you’re back to work REPLACE

Before lunchtime, his fur is wild and frizzy but free, no longer weighed down by grime or slick from stains. His torso is mostly spotless, as well as the fabric that remains on his legs, but addressing the horrible damage that spans knee-down will be another issue entirely. 

You have the fan back on him on high as you manually go over him with a hairdryer on low heat, careful not to further fry his fur. It’s definitely sustained some damage, but not enough to deter you or make you consider ripping it out and replacing it. You’re fairly happy with the color you’ve recovered from him. 

His one button comes off to soak in a bucket after you’ve noted measurements to order more. Measurements are jotted down also for his intact ear and the gap that separates his torso from the pelvis piece. 

“Racking up quite the bill,” you murmur, orbiting around him on the stool as you assess for necessary materials. You should probably call a friend. Maybe even just talk to a coworker during lunch. The most conversation you’ve had this week has been with a rotting hunk of metal. 

You make sure to record the next few hours as you measure out the expanse of his various holes, going ahead to order a roll of thick yellow fabric, and then continue your work scrubbing ferociously at the fur that is intact. This goes on for some time, broken up by a stretch and lunch break and an evening of cleaning to a podcast about animatronic restoration. 

You remind yourself, with disdain, that tomorrow it’s back to work, but you’ve got a good few hours to tend to your dear project and get some rest before heading in for the night. You leave the kitchen floor to dry and give yourself a break from the garage, switching over to your computer in your somehow even smaller bedroom. 

Clicking past the usual pointless work emails, the weekly reminders to not smoke in the bathroom, you navigate to your blog to sift through the recent comments and issue replies to some older messages that have been sitting in the recesses of your inbox. 

You’re halfway through a very wordy and impassioned bit of fanmail when you hear metal scraping. A long, long, wailing sound, profoundly horrible, that crescendos like a harp of razor wire. It’s not a sound you’ll ever hear in nature.

Stupidity and denial is a game that can be quite drawn out, but it’s not one you stomach for very long. It’s that thing, the one sitting politely, posed in a little fold out chair in your garage. You stand up from your desk and stare out the door, just fixed on the hallway outside your room that you know leads through the living room into the kitchen, which itself contains the garage door. In your head you see the doorknob slowly turn, rotating just incrementally until the latch bolt clicks. 

It’s nothing, you say to yourself, snatching your phone and starting to the door. So the thing’s still a little operational, that’s actually great news for you, your internal voice essentially begs. You switch on the hallway lights and march down the straight line that leads you to the garage. Whatever mechanisms are still inside were likely agitated by all the water, moving, essentially everything you’ve subjected the guy to, so it’s not unbelievable that he’d be acting up. Knife slides from your knife block and into your fist as you stride through the kitchen and to the door. Only there do you pause and let your hand hover, twitching, over the doorknob but eyes fixed forward, waiting for the door to rip open.

You listen for a long while, what you might think is minutes but know, simultaneously, is only a matter of some seconds. 

You grip the knife raised just slightly above your waist, ready to lunge for the first sight of something that should not be there. 

The door flies open to your garage, intact, with everything in its place, your new find included, positioned just as he was before. 

You do a quick scan, looking for anything out of its place, fallen, or toppled that could explain the noise. Even when you’re satisfied enough, your workspace, counters, and tools are all where you knew them to be beforehand, you still know that the sound was the chair being pushed back.

You almost want to apologize to the thing for being so quick to accuse him, but your nerves are alight with suspicion. You simply stand on the step by the door, staring at its unmoving, unresponsive figure, hands on your hips like you’re not wielding a kitchen knife. 

“Just feeling restless?” you ask him, just to intercept the air that’s so chokingly thick with unnerving silence. You tap the handle of the knife against your hip.

“I would be too, I suppose. Out of that dusty old room but right back into a new box and then a new dusty old room, poor buddy.”

Anxiety is a vitriolic and unrelenting demon that night.

You sleep, for once, with the blinds slightly parted, enough to permit the golden stain of light from outside to seep through the gaps in the slats and pool on the foot of your bed.  

For once the prospect of work in the morning doesn’t bring a feeling of despair, now that’s it's been made so certainly evident that you’re terribly lonely, to the point of paranoia. Even if you may never be thrilled to converse with your peers, just in the nature of the coworker dynamic, having that social outlet will be good for you. 

You let your eyes close, not fooled that you’ll drift into sleep despite the unease in your gut, but just to let your vision melt away into distant glimmers of streetlight in the dark of your eyelids.

And the doorknob turns. Creeps open, crying. A careful footstep. That barrier’s been crossed. The gate of that threshold between your house and the garage that’s been housing some insidious, building terror, tarnished in an instance, and with it, its illusion of safety. 

Your wooden floor wails out with such intensity you think you’ll next hear it breaking entirely, crashing beneath the weight of the intruder. The sound stops, though, but the minutes you spend stewing in the following silence is horribly worse.

Your eyes, now wide, wide open, are drawn over to your closet, the sliding door cracked open just by the width of your thumb. Inside is your gun safe, and inside that, your pistol.

Slowly, you rise and turn to bring your legs over the edge of the bed, gaze locked onto the door, watching the light that fills the gap between the floor for shadows. 

As soon as your feet graze the cold wood of the floor, another series of footsteps draws right up to your door. You almost don’t hear it, human and practiced, much too mindful to be a malfunctioning machine. Is it worse or better that your likely assailant is paranormal in nature? There’s nothing else to explain how he crossed such a distance completely unheard. Your house is new, yes, but the floors have had their wear and have certainly never restrained their groaning for you.

None of that matters at the moment. You register the shadow that intrudes upon the sliver of light beneath the door and launch yourself back into bed, but not before you snatch the knife you’ve wedged under your mattress. 

You tuck yourself tight back under your sheets, knife gripped to your chest, and close your eyes, letting your head roll to the side. You slow your breathing the best you can, even though the difference is insignificant—-you’re panting like a dog, your heart pounding like a battered engine.

The door opens, delicately, impossibly silent. Your heart pummels on your rib cage louder.

Left to darkness, your anxiety is all the more inflamed, forced to imagine the scene, the intruder crossing the threshold into your sacred, safe, familiar room, the hallway light illuminating you in bed, seemingly asleep but nerves on fire, as he stands and… observes? Draws a knife above his head?

Leave, leave, leave, leave, leave, you hiss in your head. Your fingers twitch over the wooden handle of the knife, searching for grooves to rest in. You hope the intruder will give you the courtesy of a warning by ripping off the covers, but there’d be no point, and you await a blade plunging through the sheets and splitting flesh. 

You don’t know how long this goes on, but your pajamas are sticking to you from sweat, and your eyes, flicking about the dark landscape of your closed eyelids, twitch incessantly.

Leave, leave, leave, leave, you keep chanting internally, hand curling further and tighter around the knife. 

You hear these low, struggling but deliberate breaths, almost gentle but hoarse and dry. It sounds like something drowned, but in ash or gravel rather than any body of water. It’s not necessarily wheezing, but certainly pained. 

You can only wonder what you’ve done to justify this mental torment, the horrible, maddening quiet as you wait, stewing in dread. You could infinitely mull over every possible grievance or past trespass to have established the scorn of some phantom presence, but it doesn’t change the reality of the moment. You faintly hear the living room clock tick, somehow audible over your own hammering heart.

The door closes, just as gently as upon his entrance, but your eyes remain closed and your breathing stays controlled and even. 

In the blackness of faux-sleep, you visualize the layout of your room, the distance from where you lay on your bed to the window over your desk or to the closet and your gun safe; beside that is the hatch to the crawlspace. You haven’t been down there since you moved in, just to survey it briefly, so you’ve no idea what manner of things occupy it, but you’re ready to face them over the mechanical monster you’ve allowed into your home. If it is that robotic beast, which you admittedly haven’t verified visually yet, then he’d have no luck following you under there, given his great height. If it is a detached spector, just loosely orbiting its object of interest, then you imagine no possible diversions would apply and you’re in better luck to just burn it all down.

He really has left, though, you verify when you hear movement in the kitchen. Still, your eyes stay screwed shut, even tighter now, as if the impression of sleep will ward him off entirely. The front door knob jiggles and clicks multiple times as he tries to twist it open. 

He wants out. 

That’s good for you.

You let your eyes open, only barely at first, the surroundings of your room, untouched, coming back into view. 

You pull the sheets off of you, with some effort, still clinging to the sweat that’s dampened your nightwear. You sit upright, knife now held upright in your lap, and listen.

After a pause, the lock of the front door clicks again, and following the pause that precedes that, you hear him tug at the backyard sliding glass door. He stops.

You’re expecting to hear glass shattering or the front door being torn off its hinges, either of which you’d welcome over being mauled, but the silence stretches on undisturbed. 

There’s a new and momentary flood of panic when you realize your phone is not in its usual place on your nightstand, and then a new torrent of dread as you remember it’s on top of the microwave in the kitchen, placed out of the way so you could reorganize the countertops. The landline is a little closer, next to the couch and above the end table, but currently, anything outside of your room is unsafe.

Work is a uniquely sour and miserable affair when you’re not sure what you’ll come home to. You had debated leaving the garage door open to let the horrible thing leave if it so desired, but you’ve also got some pretty pricey materials and tools in there you’re keen on keeping. You’re not uprooting your home to accommodate this ghoul, whether or not you were the one to introduce it into your life. You’ll have to wait for the next paycheck to hit before you can go buy cameras for the house

Is this all just some large-scale operation to teach you a lesson about reading the fine print? Did Kurt know? Furiously, you go scrolling through your order history to look for the listing with his number, but rationality follows quick enough. Such an asking price would be ludicrous and counterproductive for someone trying to free their hands of a haunted artifact, and its appearance would do it no favors in deceiving potential buyers.

Molly, the department manager, is doing her rounds, but you hadn’t realized she had stopped at your cubicle until you realized someone’s saying your name.

You swivel around in your chair to see her peeking around the partition, frowning. She’s newly promoted, young, and overeager, acting more like a mental health counselor than a manager; while it’s sweet, you’re not in the best mood for her fretting. 

“You seem a little out of it,” she says as she walks to your side.

“I’m sorry, just stuff at home, it’s nothing major,” you reply, giving a smile very far removed from your genuine ones. 

Her expression deepens, a dramatic line between her dark, furrowed brows.

“...Is everything alright at home?”

Ah. You need to reroute the conversation. You forgot most people at work don’t know you live alone, so you hadn’t caught the implication. Of course, only Molly would sniff out such a worrisome thing from you. You don’t want to be dismissive on the off chance her concern isn’t performative, though.

“Oh, no, nothing like that. I’m just unexpectedly housing a friend for a bit. My place is small so it’s a bit of an annoyance, y’know?” you pause for an uncertain chuckle, trying to analyze her expression all the way, “I’m a little tired ‘cause I’ve been sleeping on the couch is all.”

You’re surprised how plausible it sounds, reinvigorated by your quick thinking. You’re about to ruin it by making a show of stretching and stroking your back in mock pain, but catch yourself before you can

“Ahh, that’s always such a pain. It just means they owe you, though!”

Owe you he does.

You buy a big pack of salt on the way home, not the ones in a shaker but in a bag like flour, the same size and all. 

With a renewed sense of confidence despite all the warning signs, you arrive home, a sack of salt tucked under your arm, pushing inside like you don’t now share the space with a phantom of undetermined strength.

He’s in his seat when you more carefully enter the garage. You’re nervous to get close, but the task requires it, so you push past anxiety bubbling in your stomach. 

You stand before him, no longer in a good mood to converse one-sidedly with the thing, now afraid every word opens the possibility to divulge some fear or weakness for him to indulge on. You, slowly, like calling over a cat, stoop down low, ripping open the bag of salt. You take a fistfull and begin to surround him in a thick ring of salt. You step back once to assess your work, and then again kneel to widen the barrier with more dosings of salt. You lay it on thick and draw it quite wide. You even stop to estimate the length of his leg outstretched and make sure your hoop of salt is extensive enough that he couldn’t step over it even with it extended. 

The function is two-sided—if whatever occupies the animatronic is paranormal, it is barricaded inside the space of the circle, and if it is somehow and truly the thing itself, you’ll be able to confirm when the salt is disturbed. What you’ll do with that latter information, you’re not sure. Despite all the chaos your new find has introduced, you know also that he’s a once in a lifetime treasure, ratty and haunted and all.

You’re taking the first step, at least, and you try to comfort yourself with that sentiment as you stir endlessly in bed. Your phone is now at your side on the nightstand, this you’ve confirmed some twenty times, the garage is locked, the pistol out of its safe and under your bed, just this once, and you’re absolutely sleepless. The knife won't cut it, ha ha, but you’ve gone ahead and placed it on your desk, all knives laid out in the drawer of your nightstand. Somehow, in the process of clearing the block of all blades, you hadn’t registered there was one missing, assuming it had been the one you had taken before. The one you also returned and is now safely in your drawer. 

All night long you writhe in anxiety. Not a sound throughout the night, but a restless cacophony of worry in your head.

The circle hasn’t budged, not a grain out of place. You glare at it, dark, saturated bags beneath your eyes, a tired tinge of red to your sclera. 

After work, you pull up and slide into your stool wielding a grout brush and a repurposed manicure brush. You lay them on your thighs and stare at your troublesome roommate.

“...Are we at a truce?” you ask. The sound of your voice, unsteady, breaking the silence scares you more than you expect. You flinch like something hit the floor and not like you willed the words from your own tongue. 

Of course, the thing never replies. You purse your lips and think for a moment, not really expecting to have to navigate interpersonal affairs with a mechanical beast. In your prodding, you’re awarded only stinging silence.

You just nod at him like there’s some unspoken mutual settlement between the two of you, even though there very much is not, and you’ve no idea if it’s just the chain of salt around his feet that contains him and keeps him pacified. He may very well be sitting there in broiling, murderous intent, only sitting in wait for an opening.

You hold his stare, his ghastly, deathlike stare. You never did get such a close look at his eyes, and now you can appreciate how bizarre they are, a far, far cry from most of the ones you’d work with on other animatronics. They aren’t the yellowish or cartoonishly bloodshot ones you’d expect of an intended haunted house feature, but eerily cavernous, tomblike in the way they swallow light entirely. 

You pat his shoulder, even though it makes sparks of nervousness flutter up your fingers. A part of you is waiting for his hand to shoot up to snatch your wrist, surely crushing the bones there in the strength of those long, pointed metal digits. 

Even through all your apprehension, apprehension backed up by the terror he’s been subjecting you to through these past nights, you force yourself to relax as you begin cleaning out the segments of the body with the grout brush. 

You’re quick to realize, as debris and all manner of darkened crud rains to the floor, that this should’ve been done much earlier, long before you scrubbed the color back into his fur.

“You really weren’t taken care of at all, huh?” you ask him as you work, all the while avoiding looking up. 

When your shoulder starts to ache, you draw back in your seat to survey your work. The progress isn’t as immediately visible as when you attended to his fur, but the mound amassed of indeterminable grime and muck around his feet speaks to your effort. You use the nail brush to go back over him and spot treat with a gentle, personal cocktail stain remover, gently sweeping away residue from your brushing. Your eyes finally drift up to his face, thankfully unmoved, though your stare doesn’t linger for long, out of some whimsical notion of courtesy or simple fear.

“The fabric comes in tomorrow, so we can start patching up those holes of yours, and then you’ll get your buttons back,” you tell him, raking lightly through his fur with your hands. You fluff him back up to your liking and then sit back. 

“How’s that sound?”

That night, awake again in your bed, now used as your sanctuary rather than for sleep, you have to wonder what drives you. Dedication alone doesn’t keep someone in a situation like this. Stubbornness plays some insidious factor, the chain that keeps you in this deep, deep hole, digging further rather than looking to the sky, keeping you beating down into the depths of desperation with a shovel. But at the root of it all, you know that you’re unequivocally, intensely lonely. Enough so to welcome a specter into your home, it seems, to sleep just a few rooms away from a beast.

Sleep is uneasy and light, when it does come. At one point you wake at the soft thud of your pillow slipping from the mattress to the floor, and again you stir when the rare passing car rumbles by.

Molly doesn’t come back around your cubicle when she does her morning patrol, either appeased by your answer or feeling that she’s met her compassion-for-employees quota. You catch momentary glances of the top of her head as she weaves through cubicles, but you remain unbothered in yours, working through your third cup of watery breakroom coffee.

As you wade through the influx of messages in the employee portal, your mind wanders, and you find yourself scouring for the listing that had brought you to your problematic roommate. 

It’s already buried a ways down in your personal email, but when you find the confirmation message and attempt to view the post, it’s gone entirely, Kurt’s number included. Your stomach feels tight, and the coffee’s not sitting right either, churning with unease.

They don’t want him back.

You retrieve the package on your way up the porch steps, securing it under your arm as you struggle with your keys to unlock the front door.

Ever since his introduction, that walk up the driveway and through the front door no longer comes with that cold, sweet strike of relief to rinse away the sourness of the day—-now, it’s this swelling wave of anxiety that rises and peaks as your hand meets the doorknob. 

Inside is quiet and cool, backdropped by the hum of the AC you forgot to turn off before heading out. The curtains of the sliding glass door drift and flutter like the wings of a new beetle, filtering evening sunlight an intense orange. 

You flip off the air conditioning for the moment and shrug off your work bag on your bed, releasing a few buttons and kicking off your shoes.

The fridge is officially clear of leftovers, so dinner demands some more time tonight. You go ahead and retrieve the knife block where it’s been residing on your desk and fetch the knives all scattered in your drawer, slotting them back in one by one. 

You frown when you finish and one of the slots is still unoccupied.

There’s nothing hiding under your mattress when you peel it back, nothing on the floor under that might’ve fallen as you moved about in your sleep. You even tear up your sheets to make sure you didn’t fall asleep and let the knife slip into the sea of blankets, but you get nothing for your efforts, nothing after removing each one individually and jostling them about. You tear apart your room before you know that you have to acknowledge the most likely scenario. 

You’ve had it.

The garage door rips open, but this time it’s you (no unseen menace) and you make your way around the rabbit to face him directly.

“Did you take one of my knives?” you ask, arms crossed. You try not to be accusatory, given you’re still not sure what your guest is capable of, but you’re also very fatigued of being scared and tormented in your own home.

“I don’t appreciate that very much.”

You drop two packages in front of him and begin tearing them open. The first is a fat roll of yellow fabric, and the other is a baggy of loose, black buttons. You stand again and let him get a good look.

“These are for you, I wanna get you as good as new,” you say, arms again crossed. “Can you let me do that?”

You retrieve your stool, shoved under your workbench, and take a seat just outside of the ring of salt. It’s all warped and kicked around, certainly no barrier at this point, but you feel you two are past that point. 

Should you be more careful, considering this confrontation is under the assumption he is wielding a knife, yes, but all your decisions of late have been fairly questionable.

You scoop up the roll of fabric and begin unraveling a few feet’s worth of it.

“Let me do this for you, ok?”

You swivel around in your stool and trudge it back over to your desk, rifling through the plastic set of drawers you use for most of your tools. You find what you’re looking for almost immediately, an oversized pair of fabric shears, but act like you’re still hopelessly searching, making a show of digging deep into the back of each drawer. 

Sweat creeps down your neck, aware of everything: the unsteady buzz of the garage light, the harvestman inching down his web in the corner, the sound of your own controlled breathing. Is this a practice in trust, or an invitation for death? It depends on the outcome, but for now, you’re alive and untouched, even with your back to him and little distance that would give you time to run. Nothing in reach could do any meaningful damage to him, and this thought throbs in your head.

Eventually, when the act has gone on long enough to the point of theatrics, you retrieve the scissors and turn back to him.

He’s in his place, as he always is, every time.

The salt, however, has moved, swept up into a neat pile a few feet from his feet. Your sad assumption of safety in a perfect little mound. 

You think the room drops multiple degrees, but your skin is burning and you feel sweat beading on your neck. Your eyes move from him to the pile and back.

All in all, it’s not the worst thing he could’ve done. An exercise in trust, this seems to be.

You roll right past the pile, avoiding acknowledgment of its presence, and rub your hands together. 

“Okay, let’s get you patched up.”

He’s still the entire time, and so you can only wonder with some misplaced sense of frustration why he refuses to let you see him move. He certainly can, for you can’t imagine a ghost, even a particularly malicious one, would find much use in a knife. It’s a purely human instrument. Surely, were he some sort of specter, he’d have all manners of torment in his supernatural arsenal. It could actually help you, too, you think once or twice bitterly, huffing with effort as you lift each leg to assess the damage on the back. You’re not yet sure how you’ll tackle the issue of his legs, the flesh there torn and shredded as to expose the mechanical feet almost entirely, like muscle picked clean from bone. It’s recognizably the methodical work of starving rodents, shredding away the skin like vultures.

You still haven’t addressed that one tid bit that’s irked you from the start, the horrible, purpled body inhabiting the thing, a conundrum you’re no more sure of how to approach than before. You tell yourself, each time you again reach that thought, that you’ll get to it when you get to it, but truly, you’re at a loss. 

You try not to look at it too much, not the slippery strips of hanging meat or crushed flesh peeking out from gaps in the suit, fixing your eyes everywhere else that is not wet and red in your vision. 

It’s an ordeal to make the new fabric blend in believably with the rest of the suit exterior, and a number of times do you get the urge to just tear it all off and start from scratch. Doubt and the need to see this through wrestle in the landscape of your wandering mind. You think about the money you’ve spent and continue to spend on him, the nights of terror, the uneasiness that’s made itself comfortable within the foundation of your home. But what is all that in the face of loneliness? Gaping, cavernous loneliness? It’s not enough, is what.

By ten, you’ve got most of his wounds covered, at the very least. The finer tears, like the one sharp gash that stretches across his left eye, are their own hassle. They’re scar-like in shape and don’t at all match the holes around the rest of the body that are clearly a result of decay and time—-these ones are fine and precise, the edges clean in opposition to the jagged rims that outline the other areas of damage. It makes him look oddly battle-worn.

“You’ve been through a lot, haven’t you?” you ask aloud. You retrieve a pen from your desk and make small, pinpoint marks along the sternum of the suit in equal increments. You next retrieve your sewing kit, just a small, compact one with just a couple spools of thread in simple colors. just a modest selection of threads. 

As you pull out a needle, you wonder if this will hurt. You don’t know if you’re just skidding by on the thinnest of ice; that cautious voice of yours that's been apparently dormant for so long is now howling in your ear. Don’t test these waters, don’t gamble on this period of placidity. 

“Can I?” you ask, raising the needle out as if offering it to him.

“Would it hurt?” just in case he changes his mind on his vow to silence. Expectedly, you get nothing.

“Well,” you start, chewing on your lip, “it’s late. I’ll leave this here. How about…”

You spin on the stool to survey the room, but it’s your lap that your eyes end up at. 

“You put…” you finger through the options of different colored spools of thread from your kit, “white on the desk for yes, red on the desk for no.”

You retrieve the aforementioned colors and hold them up to him in your palm, you suppose on the off chance he’s unfamiliar with colors. You’ve still yet to establish what he is, so your assumptions are blind and no more accurate than a drunk man playing darts with the lights off.

“White…,” you start, holding up the referenced spool of thread, “...for yes. Red for no. You got that?”

His silence is your confirmation enough. You place both on the stool.

Another night spent longer with your eyes open, watching the ceiling, than closed in rest. You can tell it’s not a fearful strain of anxiety that’s roiling in your stomach, but it certainly is not forgiving on your system. It feels more akin to anticipation, not as hard and mouldering as the sleeplessness that’s been plaguing your nights before now. This is your first attempt at an alternative method of communication, seeing quite assuredly now that he’s not gonna come around to talking.

To liken it to the restlessness of a high schooler waiting on their interest’s reply would be laughably out of place, but there is a similarity that is not lost on you, bizarreness of it all aside. 

When it does come, very belated, your sleep is quiet. That is until you fall into a dream where you lay where you do now, in bed, and the door falls open. The tall, serrated shadow of the rabbit-thing leans into the doorway, all mottled darkness aside from bright, startling irises in gray, murky sclera. He inhales long and hard, swallowing air into his rotting lungs, turning it foul and frigid with the scent of death.

Believers do often seem to think ghosts have some influence over dreams, right? You swear you’ve heard that a number of times, you think, trying to detach yourself from the scene and your unresponsive body. In the blackness of closed eyes, you imagine yourself anywhere else.

The entire room seems to sway with his heavy footfalls, each step warping the floorboards around the metal foot as he skulks to your bedside. Your eyes open again, unwilling but transfixed. 

You don’t think it’s sleep paralysis—the distortion is not just in your body but all about the room, in twisting, melting objects and in vague shapes that ebb and wane. It’s not sleep paralysis, you don’t think, but your heart hammers harder and harder, so hard you think something in your ribcage will break. The rabbit-thing, soaked in shadow, approaches. His exposed metal innards glint in the light of a lopsided, fuzzy moon. You think you see something gleam in his hands.

Oh, you say, or you think you say, but your tongue’s not moving. Oh, he still has the knife. He was just waiting. 

You don’t feel the fear you expect, maybe because this is what you expected. There’s only you to blame, really, for every decision made that brought you here. Buying this cartoonishly monstrous slab of metal, driving the ridiculous ways to retrieve him, letting him in your house, letting him stay, letting him carry around a knife.

He finally reaches you after what feels like much too long for the distance he would’ve crossed, but nothing is quite right at the moment, too long and too saturated and too indistinct.

He crouches low next to you, the light of his eyes blinding, luminescent like the glossy, vibrant eyes of cats in the night, dark but shimmering, little pools of oil slick. Your hand, splayed out towards him, twitches, but you can’t make it move. You feel heavy, like you should be sinking, but you remain at eye level with him. 

The rabbit-thing takes your hand in his cold claws and places it under his head so he can lay on it. Oh. Okay. You blink slowly at him, not sure what to make of the sight of him pushing into your hand like a dog. If you closed your eyes tight enough you might be able to imagine it is just a dog, pleading for affection as they do. Those pale, striking irises don’t let you, however, burning even through the mask that renders your vision runny and warped.  

You pet him, not sure when you regained movement, but not questioning it, either. You stroke his head and return his stare. His breath fans deathly cold across your fingers. Cold, so cold, you expect little wet pearls of frost to bloom across your hand. 

You’re late that morning. You still haven’t settled on an emotion regarding last night's fever trip, and are happy to leave in a rush. Ignoring him, like you’re a feuding couple too prideful to break the cold shoulder. 

Work is picking up after a slow season—the company’s been invited to run a booth at a local high school’s career fair, so they’ve got the design department on full steam to get some material ready for the event. You can’t imagine how interested high schoolers are gonna be in playground design, surely more enticed by the variety of comparatively flashy and glamorous careers that always get a slot at these events.

Either way, preparations are in full swing, the department atypically busy and clamoring. You’re over at the desk of one of the concept artists to develop a diorama for your booth, leaning over his shoulder to watch as he scribbles down rushed thumbnails. 

Molly, especially vigilant today, is patrolling the aisles of cubicles methodically, like a jailer. She stops briefly to chat with your coworker about his concepts before she turns to you, smiling.

“How’s that roommate situation going?” she asks kindly. You bristle.

“Some growing pains, but I think things are going in the right direction.”

Molly nods sympathetically. You do hope things are progressing; you’re not sure how much longer you can portray your current, bizarre homelife through the framework of the rabbit-thing being a roommate and not a rabbit-thing.

You pull up into your driveway a little later than normal, towing an armsworth of grocery bags up to the front door. In the uncomfortable aftermath of your dream, you’d forgotten about the little arrangement you set up in the garage.

The groceries are deposited on the kitchen table so you can begin filing the vegetables away in the fridge. You figure your odd dream is a nighttime manifestation of your burnout—a little break from this project will be for the best. Tonight is meal prep day anyways, no longer able to stretch out leftovers, so you’ll be occupied for the evening. 

You’ve only just gotten out a cutting board and lined up a knife for the first cut of onion when this great loud twang wails from the garage. Though you’ve never heard the sounds, you can immediately pinpoint it as a hand rapping on the metal garage door. Three distinct, hard knocks.

Even with his recent increased activity, he hasn’t done something so direct, at least during the day, and you know immediately that he’s displeased. 

Carefully, you lay the knife down next to the cutting board, but your hands stay curled over the handle. No. This is an exercise in trust. You remove your hand, slowly, and let it relax at your side. Bad decision after bad decision, you just can’t cut yourself loose from this lovely hole you’re digging. 

You push open the garage door and step down inside. 

You see immediately that he’s in his seat, but anything else would be unexpected, so you step past him to look at the desk. Both threads are still on the stool, untouched, but before them on the floor the salt is spread about into a thin block. On its surface in scraggly, nearly indecipherable letters, less coherent even than chicken scratch but too intentional to be a child’s handwriting, you left. Behind it, the stool, and the missing knife stabbed deep into the cushion and through the metal bed it rests on, splitting clean through it. 

Tentatively, you pry the knife out, an ordeal that takes an incredible deal of straining and useless twisting of the blade. After a long few moments of frantic wiggling and periods of pulling and huffing, you’re able to free it, holding it up to the light to examine it. Huffing, you can see now the cracks that intersect the blade like spidery lightning bolts.

“You’re upset,” you say, not posed as the question it was meant to be.

You turn to him, knife in hand, twisting it under the light of the overhead lamp, artificial glitter running up the spine. There’s a threat to this display, and you have to acknowledge that—-this isn’t a rejected child’s tantrum, this is something monstrous but intentional. Your eyes run over the cracked blade, impressed as much as you are unsettled. You look then to the stool, and that clean slit right on the seat that runs through to the other side, metal and all. Could that be you, or is this actually a showcase of restraint? 

When you again face him, his eyes are on you, not dead and unfocused. He’s looking at you. The rabbit-thing inhales, long and deep, rasping, stinking of that cold fog of death, much like in your dream. You rush for the door, moving on instinct, no adrenaline but all fear. The lock clicks behind you and your hand remains on it as if it’ll reinforce it (but you’re flesh and he’s all jagged metal parts). You remain there, listening, but it’s a helpless cause when your heart is still battering away.

You’re heaving as Jess takes them away, lugging them by a handful of webs through glinting, crackling portals. One half of your ribs is especially tender, but you force yourself not to slouch as you watch. The thought of sinking into your mattress nearly makes you sob. 

You don’t know where the weight was when you were ripping your way through endless variations of New York and splitting your knuckles on villains’ faces, but now it’s sinking fully and deep into your bones, pooling as liquid lead in your feet. The blood, rising from cuts focused on your shoulder, your calves, is temporary and will dry up and scab soon enough; you’re more worried about the damage you can’t see. Tendons and bones that pang and nerves that throb. 

You’re afraid your grip will simply slip as you sling off the windows of tall office buildings, trying to find a more secluded rooftop, appropriately hidden, before taking your portal home. 

Your feet hit the hot blacktop of a parking lot rooftop, a landing that burns in your ankles, shit, and pull yourself up, but you feel all lopsided. You’re mulling over what to get for dinner between the drifting black spots of sleep that pool in your vision (maybe you want to sleep for a day first) when you pull your arm up to bring your watch into view—even the motion requires a considerable deal of effort and a bit of momentum to bring your elbow up to the height of your shoulder. Now that you think about it, you believe you’ve heard something about putting in requests for days off at the society. That sounds nice right about now. A weekend in bed. A cold shower to ease the burns, flush the dirt from wounds; your suit could also go for a cycle in the wash. Nobody realizes how high maintenance such a costume is. 

You think of Miguel even though your head feels like it’s being squeezed. A part of you, the softer self from earlier years in your line of work, longs for him to be proud, but the voice of reason you’ve honed is knowledgeable enough to understand recognition in an organization so densely populated is a luxury, and expecting it from Miguel is praying for rainfall in a desert. 

You think of other things. Bed, sheets, cotton warm from the dryer. Steamed vegetables, fat dumplings, sandwiches and thick-cut fries and beans over rice, your mouth is watering, your everything is aching, and then you’re falling face-first into the cracked, black turf. It burns momentarily, but you’re gone before the pain can form fully.

You try to peel your eyes open but can’t manage the will. Sleep is still recent and enticing, still ebbing, running over you in streams of backwater flow. Even the colors behind your eyes, the watery yolks of browns and yellows, are fuzzy. A particularly large breath in stings your senses awake and reminds you that you’re in fact alive. 

You expect the blue gradient of deep night when you do pull your eyes open, but light tells you it’s day, just now seeping into evening. Your eyes close again, reaffirmed. The deep ache in your stomach and sides has left, to which you untense in relief. The sweat along your hairline, your neck, collecting on your wrists, is gone, as is the weight from your eyes. That was a ridiculously good nap. 

As your senses lag behind in waking up, folding out into each limb and prickling muscle awake, you realize you’re not in your bed. Too firm, folded at angles; when you sink into it it’s not the sweet depths of your mattress or blanket but the constructed mass of muscle. You open your eyes again, let the light bleed in, gradually, then close them again, seeking refuge in the amber of sleep. 

You shift. A touch swipes across your head, fingers pushing through your hair and then draw gently along the scalp. The motion repeats, nails drawing careful lines inward. Again, again. You force tired eyes open for a longer moment, long enough for colors to sharpen into discernible shapes. Reality is delivered, served on silver platter but without flourish, abruptly. You jerk forward, finally forcing out your first sound, a questioning grunt, frazzled by sleep. 

“Don’t sit up so quickly,” you’re eased back so that your head meets—thigh? “You’ll make yourself woozy.” 

Miguel’s voice.

You slept in, it’s not today but tomorrow. Apologies and half-baked explanations tumble to the forefront of your tongue but unravel there as well. You crane your neck back to take in more bleary shapes, still sifting into finer images. It’s the colors of him, though, brilliant red and blue, a bit hard on the eyes when you’re just stirring from sleep.

You place a hand out to ground yourself, fingers stretching out curiously over ground, no, a woven, padded seat, then your palm rises instead to grope at the intrusion beneath your head. Warm, defined, not the flattened pillow back in the apartment of your personal New York. 

Realization is the best wake up call, a dose of heavy, heavy caffeine without the thick syrup introduction from coffee. Both of you jolt, you more so, him to a degree more contained, but you do feel the tips of claws flicker out from the pads of his fingers, barely grazing your scalp. You’re in Miguel’s lap, head resting on his thigh. 

A pang of silence rolls around the room, rattled like a lone coin in a silver piggy bank, silent in a way that is intrusive and impossible to ignore. The coin falls. 

“How was your little nap?” Miguel asks, focused in front of him.

You wonder if it’s said in humor, but that’s not what he does, so maybe it’s a patronizing jab. You’re going to wake up with the entirety of the HQ pooled around your desk like it’s high school and you fell asleep during the lecture. The realization that it’s only you two is almost worse. 

It takes a concerning deal of will power, maybe down to the last drop, not to take a quick squeeze of appreciation (the fixture of the suit prompts the eyes to wander). Even still, your fingers still linger in one spot before you can rip them off with the urgency as if you’d been scorched, looking at them with the same expectancy of warped scars, but it’s only your hand that you look back at. No singed or scalded skin. 

Again you place it in front of you then slide your weight forward to prop yourself up on your forearm and elbow, sluggish and gingerly, like rising through a coat of snow, comparable to its allusions to hibernation. 

“You’re fine where you are,” Miguel says again, and now you can 

He holds his voice in such an authoritative grip that you’re late to realize he’s attempting to settle you and not chastise you. He must sense your anxiety, maybe something he can sense simply through touch, to hear the rapid thrumming of your pulse in your neck and ribs. The speciality of your accelerated senses vary from spider-person to spider-person, so who can say?

You’re in Miguel’s office—but the word never felt right to tack onto the odd, grand intricacy of the bizarre auditorium he conducts the majority of his universe observation; it's a little more abstract than that word constitutes. It was always a sort of amphitheater to you, fixed around the platform of his desk and display of screens and windows, live feeds of little worlds piled over each other in adjustable tabs, screens staggered by video lag. He whisks away a clip of a world you’ve seen him linger on time and time again but never let yourself ask about. 

You let yourself still, and so he resumes petting your head. All the feeds stop suddenly, paused onto snapshots of worlds of every palette.  

“…did I fall asleep?” you finally say when your throat is no longer dry as coal. You did, but you’re looking for a little further elaboration. You have an idea, a very sensible reason in mind, but are lost when it comes to how you got here. Miguel gives you special attention, no doubt, a fact that’s become less and less hidden over the progression of your time together. It goes relatively unquestioned though, sparing you of a deeply uncomfortable but arguably justified confrontation. It’s likely his constant present at your side that wards off such altercations at all. 

He doesn’t answer straightforwardly. 

“You weren’t taking care of yourself,” is his response, but it sounds less like a reply and more like the introduction of a grim matter. No matter how close you do draw, he never entirely drops his formality, except for catastrophic events of frustration. He still isn’t chastising you, but his tone is more equipped for a serious intervention at the dinner table.

Mentally you turn your word bank this way and that, give it a few solid smacks, and hope a series of clever words will tumble out and into a quippy, lighthearted reply, the majority of your side of your guys' banter, but you only manage a guilty sounding noise of agreement, on its own a confirmation of his observation.

His hand stops and allows him a second to glance down at you impassively and then back ahead, apparently unbothered by whatever was transpiring. Now that your senses have sharpened back to working order, you can feel all your blood burn in your cheeks and warm your skin with a sudden flow of heat. 

“I guess I have,” you continue, embarrassed by your lackluster response. Your tongue never works so well around him, vengeful in its drive to embarrass you in his presence. 

“I mean that seriously,” Miguel says, and he surely does, since he ends that with your name, a personalization he doesn’t often bestow upon others. You never especially noticed until it took you by surprise when he addressed you directly and it hit like a crisp, open-palm slap across the back of the head. Your neck could’ve twisted with how quickly you snapped your head towards him. 

There’s a million and more half-formed, undercooked explanations clanging around in your head but the words don’t fall into place, jostled by an anxiety you can’t place. 

You try to lift yourself up another time by swinging your weight upwards but this time Miguel places his hand on your chest to sink you down onto your back. 

“You know that’s a problem,” Miguel continues.

“Yes,” the first word you can dish out of your scrambled vocabulary. 

“That’s part of your work—making sure you’re in operating condition. We need you functioning properly.”

“Yes,” you say again, blinking. Miguel keeps petting you. Is he going to address that? You’re nervous that if you mention it he’ll stop, so just let your teeth sink into your bottom lip, only enough to burn distantly. 

“There’s no point in working at all if you’re not in working order.”

You watch the mask of his suit dissolve, threads of light glittering and then melting to reveal the face beneath it all. The red and blue of his second face, with slanted, fierce eyes, erodes, the color retreating into the neckline of the suit. And then it’s just him, eyes still fixed forward but without the glassy reflection of a screen lighting a kaleidoscope in the iris and whites of them. 

You stare a bit too longingly and let your teeth grind further into your lip until it outright hurts and you stop. 

“Entendido,” you finally respond, attempting to sound unbothered and lightsome, as much as your buzzing nerves will allow. Attempting to explain oneself never goes well with Miguel; if it doesn’t suddenly escalate things, it’s a lost cause. In one ear and out the other if it had registered in the first one at all.

He, again, looks back down at you, now with his face, his features, his heavy eyes, dark with deep lines streaked beneath them. And still uncomfortably pretty. 

“You taking care of yourself too, though?” you ask. Something in his expression twitches, his lip pulling to the side. You watch his chest bob with a noiseless laugh. 

“Let’s get you something to eat, a proper meal,” Miguel begins, turning his head away. Blue light runs along his profile like a torrent of vivid, colored rain, mapping the dimensions of his features, searing gray and purple on his skin. 

“You too,” you snap back, laughing when he grunts dryly in response. The pain in your skull is distant, maybe gone entirely. 

Carefully, you draw a hand back up to your head and let it settle gingerly on Miguel’s thigh beside your chin. He doesn’t react, so you let it rest fully on his leg and dare your eyes to flutter back closed. 

He works so hard, more so than you, than perhaps anyone in the organization; he’s dedicated his entirety to this line of work, and the stress is evident and insurmountable. You can only imagine the extent of the weight on his shoulders, only a quarter of the total made visible on his face. You could turn this all around on him and it would likely be even more relevant than when directed at you. For the moment, you can only furrow your brows and hope your concern is palpable in its sincerity and depth.  

You are hungry, very much so, can feel the insistent ache roll around in your empty stomach, couldn’t ignore it for the world, but your attention is drifting, stuck on the warmth of Miguel, the tightness in your chest that isn’t unpleasant but unquiet. Not entirely excitement, but something not far off from it, either. If this is his approach to you overworking yourself, you’re not sure it will be effective in dissuading you. 

Suddenly, energy thrums across his arm and centers on the wrist on his watch, energy that sparks orange lighting up the screen. Lyla’s little flickering likeness sprouts up from the device, pushing her glasses back up to her eyes with a pointer finger. 

“Miguel,” comes her voice, crackling through a bout of brief static. She’s seen too much of everything from every numberless span of universities to comment on your current position, even as you catch her eyes dart over to you with a crease between her brows. And maybe a cruelly amused, sharp smile.

“Spider-Man Poland wanted to get back to you on t—”

“Te escucho, I’ll see to that, mute for an hour, Lyla,” Miguel replies, collected. He hadn’t exactly jumped, but you noticed how he straightened his back, and again the momentary intrusion of the claws from his fingertips. You had assumed up until now that he had full control over its functions.

“..Mm?” Lyla closes the hand she had been gesturing with. Her eyebrows are raised so high they nearly float off her head.

“Mute for an hour.”

She blinks, again pushes her glasses back up although they’re already at the summit of the slope of her nose. Her fiddling causes them to slouch back down anyways. She tucks her arms into her sides and purses her lips before relenting, disappearing back into the watch, the screen flickering off with her departure with a begrudging, “Of course.” 

Against your better judgment and knowledge of Miguel’s temperament, you risk to ask, “are you mad?”

He moves his hand to run along your shoulder instead, down to the elbow and then jumping back up, repeating. Your throat is dry again. Not in fear of his answer, but more akin to the deep thrumming of your heart. 

“Disappointed,” he offers after a pause, but it isn’t said with commitment, only proposed as a response to appease your inquiry. It’s said soft enough to dispel your worries in that regard. It’s not fatigue that eases the tone of his voice but something gentler. Everything in you burns. There is another pause that leaves you reeling for words to sate the silence with, but Miguel speaks first.

“Yes,” he starts, apparently answering himself, “why don’t we get lunch? Food would do us both good.”

He turns to you, not frowning, his version of a smile. His expression is lighter, at the very least, missing the distinct, pronounced lines of a scowl or sleeplessness, muffled at least by something discernibly sweeter. With eyes fixed on his, you nod slowly. He ruffles your hair briefly and your heart does something weird, a skittish, lopsided cartwheel, in your chest.

“Five more minutes, though,” you say, hoping the humor in your voice is more audible than the sheepishness. 

“You know how busy I am.”

You do, god you do, you’re not sure how he thinks such a thing is something that could slip your mind like. His schedule, packed until it bulges at the seams, is one you are fully and extensively aware of, especially since he never usually has the time for little moments like the one you’re sharing now. Never surrounded by so many people, and so many people so alike you that share such specific beats in their history have you still been so deeply lonely. 

“Two more minutes,” you suggest, instead. If not for an extended history with Miguel, you wouldn’t joke with him like you did. You sling your banter back and forth, mostly forth and at his expense, only because he has an undeniable soft spot for you that hadn’t been hardened like the rest of him, the gap between the armor. It might, soon, with your consistent pestering, but you know him, know when to stop, know or at least think he holds a tenderness for your joking, if a little touchy.

He is unamused, leaning his face on a fist, lips tight, but he doesn’t push. 

“Two more minutes,” he relents, “but I hope you’re taking this all seriously.”

You are, a bit too much so, if your hammering heart is anything to go by. You’re too flustered to manage a smart response, opting again to nod wordlessly. You let your eyes close again and lean your head back against his thigh.

“Use the claws again,” you say, opening your eyes enough to stare, half-lidded, up at him. He makes a gruff noise of question. You take his hand by the wrist to guide it back to the top of your head, your fingers daring to brush up to his, linger there, too, palm to palm.

“It feels nice, use your claws,” you continue. He squints at you, maybe mistaking your request for another joke to ease the startling gentleness of the situation, and therefore the embarrassment that burns in you (and must in him too, you imagine, despite the level expression and casualness of the act). How do you muster the sincerity onto your face?

He doesn’t, just lets his hand lay stiff against yours and remain there even after you’ve withdrawn your own. You think you’ve ruined it all until he looks away and continues petting you, drawing the peaks of his angled claws lightly down your scalp. This continues in silence until it burns at him and he realizes he’s gone rigid, tension bunching his shoulders and wringing his guts through anxious, thorough hands. Soon it’s his head that’s scrambled by embarrassment, a feeling that was, before this, distantly and safely in the past. He busies himself with a screen, hoping the light of it drowns out the deepening color in his cheeks. Fuck. Acting like some schoolboy. He crashes a fist down on his desk and it rattles an assortment of things, including you.

The holidays mean an influx of customers at work in your tailor shop. Velvet dresses brimming with foamy lace, pristine suit jackets, matching dress pants, carefully embroidered button ups, all divided cleanly and safely in sheets of plastic on color coded hangers. No one ever picks up their items on time; instead, they love to wait until the last half hour before closing to all rush over and come stampeding in like loose cattle, typically requiring you to stay open an extra twenty or so excruciating minutes. 

Today, that works in Danny’s favor.

He had been stressing. He hadn’t planned on taking on another victim this week—it was shaping up to be a slow one, and he was very much ok with that. Nearly getting unmasked in a skirmish a month ago had sent him into a period of hiding and reminded him of his humanity. It was weird to say he was rattled by the experience. That is all to say the night was meant to be uneventful. Money was tight, as it always seems to be around the holidays, in time for the blinking assault of green and red lights and the spray of white paint in shop windows to imitate a snowy landscape. 

The two of you had agreed you wouldn’t be able to do anything particularly fancy today, no extravagant gifts or pricey restaurant trips. He had been saving, even still, with the hopes of buying you something. He had never been great with picking out gifts, given that he had never been on the receiving end, either, so he had struggled to find something meaningful. Not to mention, a medical bill all over a few stitches had eaten through his last couple of paychecks (only cementing the idea to him that he ought to learn how to close up a wound on his own). 

A nice dinner at home is planned for the evening. It won’t be anything spectacular, he reminds himself, but he’s insistent to show that he’s remembered. He’s been so caught up in his other identity, only recently breaking from this character to wonder if he’d been neglecting you. Danny knows he’s too involved in orchestrating the script of Ghostface, it’s an all consuming aspect of his person, he’d never be able to part from the persona he’s drained so much thought into—there’d been incredible hesitation from the get go when he met you and things advanced further than expected. Inevitably, between you and the Ghostface, one would end up untended to, and your recent sourness suggests that has been you.

That’s why this display seems too insultingly minor. A nice dinner and time spent with a loved partner should communicate appreciation, but Danny was never great at operating interpersonal relationships. It would be naive to say they scared him, rather it’s like handling an exotic animal. That’s his problem—Danny performs, directs, coordinates, he doesn’t truly live, does he? Everything is a value he wants precedence over. He earns a look from a passerby when he scoffs out loud. 

He’s off early, headed to the grocery store, admittedly bitter thinking about the trek back on foot, but there’s a delightful little change in plans when he sees her.

Gold, curled hair, with gleaming green eyes and cakey foundation that flakes at her deep smile lines. She’s a beautiful woman, no doubt about it, but his attention is fixated on the hand clutching her purse; some forgettable designer brand, presumably, but he looks further at a finger wearing a glittering ring (he didn’t think or care to check if it was her ring finger, his mind was set.) It’s gorgeous, a gentle gold that’s not overwhelmingly yellow—rosey is the word—curling delicately around a gleaming gem. It’s undeniably opal, with how the light on it shifts in a kaleidoscope of colors, not diamond, but he thinks he prefers it. Everyone does diamond, anyways. His mind is made in that moment. 

The lady nearly shoves past him, too entrenched in a loud conversation with the man next to her, decidedly not a partner, given the many feet of space between them. Danny stops for only a second, not letting himself stare, but he feels his heart thunder.

He thinks. But not for too long. He listens to their voices fade until they’re unintelligible before he stops again, thinks again, purses his lips and pretends to pat desperately at his pockets, making a show of sighing and throwing his head back, frustrated, before turning on his heel and starting down the sidewalk in the direction the two had disappeared. There had not been anyone else around, something he had eventually begun to note subconsciously whenever in public, but he’s practiced the display so much it was almost subconscious itself. 

She never thinks to look back. Not once. Not after parting with her friend, not after taking a shortcut down a considerably darker street, slipping only infrequently under the weak shower of light from buzzing street lamps. It’s too perfect, he almost wonders if he’s being led into some elaborate trap. In hindsight, it would have been smart to keep track of the street names, but he’s just a little clumsy tonight.

He must practically be stepping on her heels when she finally tenses and flips around, eyes already wide, a misty gray in the dark gradient of the night. So wide. This might be the only instance where he’ll remember the color of a victim’s eyes. She goes for her pocket knife, only, at most, the size of her hand outstretched. He goes for his own knife. 

He didn’t think about the clean up that would follow, or about the time. Fuck, fuck, he wants to kick himself, get a good, solid punch in there that would make him stagger back. He has to hope the ring will fit you as he tries to screw it back and forth, inching it off her finger. In increasing desperation, he’s attempting to wrench it off, something crunching. If he waits too long, the joints will go rigid and he might then have to saw the digit off entirely, and it wouldn’t be too pleasant of a gift if the ring came with a knifed finger attached. He wished he would’ve just reverted to his high school ways of petty robbery, but his face is bare to the pungent, stinging night, no usual robes to conceal himself. 

That’s not what the Ghostface does, anyways—theft at knifepoint. The papers would mischaracterize him after all the careful, deliberate consideration gone into his depiction, both on Ghostface’s and Danny’s parts; for Ghostface, the victims, chosen not irregularly on a whim (randomly, to any outsider) with no connections or immediately discernible motives. He loves to make them really think, so much of the threat is built in the wildly intense imagination of the public. The playfulness and the brazenness and how they intersect in shameless pictures, taunting notes and evidence left purposely. For the latter, nights of writing and rewriting paragraphs, descriptions, careful word choice to hammer in the threat that the next victim could be anyone, could be the reader. The Ghostface never has to kill, he wants to and does so without reason, that’s what makes him so unnerving, Danny thinks, scowling to himself. He finally twists the glimmering ring free from her limp finger, almost taking the skin with it as he digs his fingernails angrily beneath the band. He lets himself laugh once in triumph, a single, full exhale like he’d been struck in the sternum.

His work gets sloppy when he gets frustrated. He reminds himself of this as he turns the ring over in his palm, finally free. He thinks about your delighted face and his expression finally softens. 

Danny massages his forehead and the lines that are certain to form there with all his grimacing and scowling. How late is it? He looks up to the darkening sky like the moon itself will reveal the time engraved onto its surface. This might be the first time he’s killed in plainclothes. He thinks he should remember something like that, but all the bodies, different as they were, mold together in his memory. Every face, the ones he can visualize, overlay each other. There won’t be a fancy dinner for the two of you tonight, but he’s decided this is much better.

He lifts his arm just to watch the blood on his hands travel down his wrist and then down his forearm, two thin, winding snakes. 

He could risk rushing home and pray to every God from every doctrine that you’re not there yet, or wait out the night and return home late, praying, then, that you’re deep in sleep. It’s your anniversary, though—he imagines he could live with you believing he’s cheating on you over you finding out, but he must be going soft, because the image of you waiting all evening, alone, perking up at every noise outside at the possibility it’s him at the door, it makes him feel like someone has his guts in a fist. Plus, the Ghostafce is out and about, it’d be stupid to leave you on your lonesome. 

You have no idea what he does for you.

He stands outside your house, streaked with browning stripes of blood, disheveled, empty-eyed, probably appearing like an intruder. He still has no idea what hour of night it is, but the lights in the house are off, and for once he is unsettled by the sight of it, a cold dread that spider webs under his skin, drastically unlike the flush of relief as he might trudge up the same pathway after a cruelly long day of work.

Finally he forces himself up the steps of the porch and snags his key from his pocket (and now there’s blood on it, too), essentially slamming it into the lock and twisting it open while he clutches his bloody shoes by the heels in the other hand. He careens inside, pulled along by the tilting weight of his own body, finding himself hoping that the neighbors assume him to just be deeply, profoundly drunk should they be watching at this time of night. He slams the door and the house shudders with it then moans in relief as it settles. Fuck, darling, I’m so sorry if I kept you waiting, I actually, really fought tooth and nail to get you this gift. Haha. Like it was the last one, some other guy had the same idea, Christ, we got in a scuffle and nearly got kicked out. Ah, my nose hurts, is it bleeding? I didn’t notice. He’s vomiting words in his head louder than the voice that berates himself for his carelessness (he might even be saying these things aloud, expecting you to be there, horrified). You’re not there. He should be unimaginably relieved, but his stomach only tightens and he can feel the burn of bile stirring at the bottom of his throat. 

Danny can’t bring himself to turn on the light, to douse himself in sudden vision and see the red that he nonetheless feels wet on his chest. He’d never been too disturbed by the sight before, or even the tangy scent that seems so oppressively pungent now, but at the moment he just doesn’t want to think. He really does start to feel like an intruder. He shoves the door closed with his elbow (had he touched the knob with his hands when he opened it?) suddenly silencing the whisper of crickets humming behind him.

Finally his eyes fly to the clock on the oven, artificial red painting out the numbers 6:04. You get off at 6:30, and usually arrive home fourteen after. Fuck. This time he does kick, his target the gray loveseat in the living room. Carefully, he turns on the light with the back of his left hand, the one kindly less bloody.

In an instant he’s ripping a pan out from the kitchen cabinets and tossing in a cup or more of water, setting it to boil. The ring will go in there—for his poor work shoes, though, he’d just gotten them, and they’re genuine leather. They’re not fancy by any extent, but comfortable, and again, a pretty, toffee-colored leather. He throws them in a wash bin for now. He peels off his uncomfortably wet socks, stained from the night and damp from the lawn. Gross, whatever, he can make himself part with those. He tries to tell himself the same for his shirt as he rips down the buttons (he’s got a closet with nearly a dozen more indistinguishable dress shirts, bought in bulk from an acquaintance’s department store). Necessary sacrifice, his internal voice barks, ever cold.

His eyes never leave the clock, and then when they do, the harsh lines of the digital numbers are seared into his eyes like the blackened letters of a branding iron, and are just as blistering. 

It’s 6:13, as he lets the ring soak in a bowl of steaming water, standing to the side, using a toothpick to carefully pick the blood out from under his fingernails. 6:14. The minute had gone by in the length of a second. There’s no candle in the world strong enough to mask the searing smell of bleach-based cleaning products, but he still steals one of yours to light. At 6:22 he nearly breaks down crying. Five minutes are spent glaring at his reflection, looking for traces of blood, staring so long and without blinking that he begins to see red where there is none. 6:30, he breaks down, but into disbelieving laughter.

It’s past seven when you do get off, bursting out of the tailors shop like a bird trapped indoors, tugging on your jacket and feeling for your keys as you jog around the building to the side parking lot, your car the only one left. The pulsing lights of neon shop lights are your personal holiday display, speckled and frosty as they’re reflected on the sidewalk glossy with rain. Your breaths are accentuated in white foam, dissolving quickly into the oppressive air of winter nighttime. You scan the parking lot to confirm it is as vacant as it looked upon first glance. You find yourself staring out into the darkness just outside the chain link fence enclosing the parking lot, picking up tens of silhouettes in the dark treelines. 

You hurry into the driver's seat, key in the ignition immediately, no idling like you may have earlier this year. Danny has never been especially worried about the killer ever-present in the headlines, never a degree that seemed appropriate. You’d snapped at him once about a little joking comment and he’d been quick to protest that humor is how he tends to deal with tension, but you still worry he doesn’t take it all entirely seriously. You’ve been begging him for what must be a week by now to stop walking home. There’s only one car between the two of you, and you’re the one to end up with it most days; Danny’s work is closer to your shared home and in a more well-lit, populated part of town, in between an intersection of office buildings and cafes and sleek looking restaurants. Your job at the tailors is nearing the very outskirts of the town, where the roads broaden, much less busy as they wind through collections of strip malls and perpetually open gas stations. The walk back home, on foot, would be half an hour with few witnesses, so therefore you end up with car privileges most shifts.

The car rattles to life. You go to turn the knob for the headlights, watching out the front windshield, imagining he’ll be there in the beams of light when they blink awake.

You and Danny both have knives. A variety. He jokes he’ll never need to use his, but brings one whenever leaving the house, as is the same for you (in addition to the pepper spray he’s persistent you keep on your person). Your hand crawls towards your jacket pocket, feeling the concealed shape of it to confirm its presence. The Ghostface isn’t standing opposite of you when the headlights do power to life, but you don’t waste any more time before you reel out of your parking spot and onto the main road. 

The drive home doesn’t seem to happen at all, glides by mechanically until you’re stepping out of the car and onto pavement and staring at your own house. You blink, eyes all smudgy from viewing stop lights from a foggy windshield. It only really takes the walk up to the door to reawaken all your muscles and remind yourself you're alive, thankfully, pushing open the door just as you realize the doorknob is slightly dewy, and unlocked. 

The warmth of your kitchen is unearthly, or heavenly is the right word. You smell something heavy and hearty, intersected by the less pleasant stench of an assemblage of cleaning products (a smell so progressively common in your household your only hope is you’ll become used to it). 

Danny appears from the hallway, or had been standing there already, and smiles tiredly. Poor thing. You can only imagine he’s worked himself to the bone, maybe with you on his mind. He always tells you how you’re his driving motivation, that he has to remind himself of you when work is additionally cruel. 

You’ve yet to say a word to each other, something not entirely necessary; his arms are around you already, drawing you in tight. 

“I’m sorry I’m late,” you huff, but he shakes his head quite intently.

“No worries, not a single one,” he replies honestly, finally pulling away to meet you face to face. You had presumed he was going to heckle you a good deal for being late, just given the tension around the city and recent crime, but it never comes up. He only rubs the sides of your arms with a twitching smile.

Danny steps back fully, but still guides you, ringing you in from the entryway over to the kitchen. 

“No fancy dinner, like we agreed,” he starts, obviously alluding to something that has you a little worried—not unpleasantly, really, but a tight feeling in your side that is likely guilt. He’s the sort of guy to say he won’t get you anything but go ahead and do so anyways; a part of you knew you weren’t gonna shake that from him this year, but with money a concern, you had hoped he would swallow his pride and resist. 

“I got you something else, though,” Danny continues, smiling more genuinely, nearly relieved. He retrieves a brown satin pouch from the dinner table, something only the length of his palm. 

He instructs you to extend your arm out so he can place the pouch in your hands, and now that almost wince of a smile is genuine. 

“I really work so hard for you,” he laughs, but cuts himself off quite suddenly. Something like shame twists at his expression. “I don’t want you to feel guilty, though, no—I’ve just been saving up for a little something.” 

The smile is wider, now with teeth.

“Jed,” you say, low. He shakes his head, dismissing you before you can object.

“I really do love you.”

It’s genuine when he says this, but also not his fault that you always react perfectly. He really is so fantastic as a director, and you as the set piece. 

Your best bet for getting to know him is familiarizing yourself with and learning to read his reactions and body language. This is harder to get a grasp of without a visible face to interpret, but you’ll begin to pick up on things you hadn’t noticed before; he rolls his shoulders back and points his feet forward when he’s interested. He’ll begin to gradually look aside if he isn’t. The flexing and twitching of his fingers is somehow infinitely expressive in the absence of words.

He goes about a similar process with you—he spends more and more time just watching you and how your face changes, or the variation in your voice, in your posture. Admittedly, he can only tell so much from a facial expression; he knows the telltale signs of pain, the deep lines of anguish or outright despair. He knows the gritted, grinding teeth and furious brows of someone enraged, even the glow of satisfaction, but anything beyond that may as well be new territory to him. 

One way, though, to tell that he certainly likes you is that he looks at you fairly frequently. This would seem insignificant in just about anyone else, but Tarhos looks at people only when speaking with them. Not when spoken to or at, but when he puts himself on equal footing with another person so that they may discuss. He almost regards the world and other people like a single, separate entity. He does not always immediately look away when you catch his stare, but certainly doesn’t appear that he wants his interest to be known. You might never fully know what he’s thinking, but you might be somewhere momentarily in those thoughts. 

He doesn’t ever really properly hold your hand, which requires him to bend down or slant his shoulder down uncomfortably—instead, he’ll more often wrap his hand around the back of your arm. It’s a little funny, appearing as if he’s taking you prisoner rather than attempting casual affection. 

At some point in his life, if not during his initial capture, he realized there would be no place for him to have a lover of any sort, and given his asocial tendencies, he thought he had come to terms with that notion. Now that he’s met you, there’s been a pretty significant shift in his outlook for the future; he’s lost in how to fit you into it, and though at first this disruption is greatly offending to him, he realizes that there is an appealing aspect to perhaps settling down. For once there is an end in sight to the torrent of still, bleeding bodies. Just understand that his decided code of chivalry is very far disconnected from the stereotypes lovingly illustrated in adventure books. He’s more acquainted with the sight of mangled meat between the silver plating of ruptured armor. 

He wouldn’t have ever considered himself affectionate, at any earlier point would’ve have loudly scoffed at the term, but if you can get him out of his grungy helmet and coax him into letting you brush his hair, he’ll become insistent that you do it routinely. 

Tarhos might enjoy sparring with you on occasion, but these sessions tend to become more of him fixing your form and instructing you than actual skirmishes. He repeatedly has to stop to walk over and correct your stance. He’s infinitely more knowledgeable and trained than you—it’s more than second nature, but first—it’s unrealistic you’ll ever best him, but then again, you have the eternity of the Entity’s Realm to train. He’s certainly going easy on you, otherwise you’d be wiped out in the first few moments, but there’s been a handful of times you had gotten a legitimate hit on him. You had even sent him to his knees in one instance (he was at his feet again in seconds, and you suspect he had only ever got him there, in the first place, by surprise, but it felt unspeakably good).

Will not kiss your hand unless outright asked to, sorry. It had never been customary for him, beautiful maidens with rich dresses were not the ones enlisting him to go out and kill and shed pails of blood, were certainly not being saved by him, and never did spare him glances, unless they were colorless and terrified. Even the curt shake of hands was not typical in deals between those who enlisted him. However, he’ll oblige upon your request, and soon it becomes the only way he greets you when meeting again after time apart. This seems to work better after you had talked him out of bowing to you everytime.

He finds himself on edge whenever you’re away, now, especially when in a trial. He trusts you to hold your ground and keep yourself alive, but worry is such a new feeling to him that it feels, at times, unbearable. He’s never even worried for himself—things just happened and he would soldier through it, that is how his life had always been. No threats of torture or unrelenting whips had made his stomach turn and roil like it did as he paced in your absence. Days spent in sunless, lightless cells had seemingly passed faster than the time he would await your return to the campfire, to him.

He won’t run to you and hug you and sob at your feet when you reappear, but he’s back at your side before the hazy fog of the trial can leave your system. He similarly appears to search for you first when he returns from a trial.

Pet names don’t immediately appeal to him, but if you beg him for one, he’d settle on something like ‘my treasure’ or culver. ‘My heart’ is another, but he struggles to get it out and will oftentimes just stare intensely at you, trying to force the words together, hoping maybe you’ll understand and spare him the vulnerability. It’s odd, dated, and not what would come to mind when thinking of a nickname for a lover, but he actually likes it when you refer to him as your suitor. Maybe it is its explicitness, that it serves as a declaration and can only be said wholeheartedly.

ALTRUISTIC S/O

Tarhos wouldn’t believe you to be naive or ignorant for your benevolence, only ineffective. He’s found what works best for him and scarcely strays from that; slaying carelessly, indifferent to whoever stands opposite of him and his sword. He never reprimands you, nor ever feels the need to, even if your choices may puzzle him. He decides that the world will straighten you out if it so necessary, that everyone will come to learn of its ruthlessness (however life decides to show that side of its many-faced form). 

He’s aware there are less violent, distastefully bloody ways to get what he wants, but the both of you can imagine he hails from a comparatively more savage background where brutality could be called common; in his eyes, Tarhos only adapted to the cruel circumstances of the society he found himself in. Nurture and nature were equally unkind to him, a pair of twin demons. He might struggle to conceptualize the drastically different life and time you came from, but never looks down on you for your selflessness. He might, however, feel the need to look out for you, knowing how ruthlessly unforgiving the world can be at times. 

Eventually might develop a greater appreciation for your abundant kindness when he finds himself on the receiving end. He’s especially appreciative if you’d offer to rub his shoulders from time or time, or help him with shedding or donning his armor. Unfortunately, with such underdeveloped interpersonal skills, his only means of expressing gratitude is extending his services to you, i.e. slaughtering an individual per your request.

He knows you know better, so when he follows, it is willingly and adoringly, but still your pulse flits in your chest. Your breaths draw tightly, like drawing back the taut string of a bow, pulling into a knot in your chest.

Assuming the role of observer, you sit in your own darkness, far enough to be out of sight as he makes his way across the porch, but still only a generous stride or two away from the door. You watch a gloved hand reach out and sit on the handle of the door, waiting a beat. Two, three. It could be five minutes or your impatience stretching out the seconds painfully. The fingers curl, drive the door open somehow silently, a feat you could not replicate. 

Another pause that makes you despise his tremendous supply of patience. Your legs burn with restlessness. 

Finally, one boot inside, he manifests in the doorway, resembling his namesake; he is a phantom against the backdrop of a bleached moon. His white, howling face is expressive but unreadable. The leather of his boots is old and crisp and hardened with wear, and yet somehow every step is soundless, even when his movements become comfortable and comparatively careless. He knows your house well; the initial chill of the water warms. 

There is no indication that he is breathing until he inhales a long breath, taking in smell of your home. Neutral, woody, maybe the afterthought of your dinner the prior hour still in the air. 

He steps forward again and scans the room. When his mask then fully faces you, the gaping expression bordered by intruding moonlight, you lunge. 

Your palms press against the muscle underneath his collarbones, tight with knots and fitted with scars. You make eye contact briefly before he’s tipping down towards the floor with you after him. His back thuds hard against the wooden floor and he exhales, almost gasps, as you push yourself above him, your hands moving instead to restrain his wrists and pull them above his head.

For the most momentary second he panics, thrashes and rapidly flexes his fingers upon finding them captured. Not a cornered animal, but a hunter disarmed. He recovers quickly and falls still, chest heaving slightly.

You’re smiling. Finally, he laughs croakily, hinges on an old door. 

“Hi,” you say, leaning forward onto your wrists. You rub your thumbs over the veins in the tender skin of the gap between his gloves and sleeves. He’s as cold as a body long dead—always is, if you did not feel his pulse under your fingers now you could believe he was not alive at all. 

“Did I get you? A little?”

Your conversations, if such a casual word could be applied to your bizarre dynamic, are frequently one sided, but you really don’t care; on the occasions he does open his mouth, it’s never the most charming dialogue, so you appreciate his inclination for silence.

“I missed you,” you mutter. Your voice sounds so brittle, splintering in your throat. 

He jerks his wrists aside to signal his impatience; never the one for fond words. You’re a little saddened by his dismissal of your vulnerable, tender honesty, but you’re forgiving tonight. 

You lead this wraith through your house and to your room. He’s soundless, drifting behind you—one day you’ll ask him what oil he uses on his boots. You glance back only once to confirm his presence, then stare, watching the way he phases in and out of protruding shadows, discernible only in brief gaps of moonlight. 

His white mask—the awful specter—somehow intrudes your thoughts and dreams affectionately. Feverishly, too, in visions where he squirms under you and smiles open-mouthed, inviting you to devastate him. He’s cold as you hold him right now, but in those scenes his skin sears you, hot on your tongue when your teeth sink in the vulnerable bridge between his neck and collarbone. 

Now in your room, you draw the blinds tight. They were only ever open so late to invite one intended voyeur; you need no more.

You turn around and watch as he breaches the threshold of your doorway. His hand goes for the belt you know holds a lineup of small knives—you reach him first, taking him suddenly by the shoulders down to the floor. He folds to his knees so hard he gasps. Up to this point in this interaction, you’d been very restrained about jostling him around, not that he could easily stop and just as easily overpower you if inclined, but this sudden harshness is 

Before you fully feel the intrusion of guilt, even if it is unrealistic to have hurt him any significant amount, he laughs. 

“You’re so good,” he commends you, stopping to laugh some more. “But don’t you want to do more?”

It’s very transparently an invitation. By the way his chest is lurching with each breath you can tell he’s excited. How he loves to badger you, perhaps that alone supplies him with pleasure. 

He extends his arms outward then makes a show of twisting them and securing them behind him. 

“All yours,” he says, a statement as much as it is a request. 

You pet him and he nearly lets himself lean into it, but does not.

“I had something specific in mind,” you prompt. You jerk him back up to his feet and he happily relents.

Leaving him in your bedroom to step away to the bathroom feels mildly bizarre. As you turn your hands under the run of cold water, you envision him, this phantom, sat patiently in the room over, on your bed and on your sheets, cross-legged. If you had been anybody else, emerging from their bathroom to drag themselves back to bed, he would’ve stood, silently, then jolted forward, dug his knife up into your stomach and still smiled when you dropped. 

It’s a discerning thought, one that reminds you who he is, who he had almost been to you, too, until you step back into your bedroom with the intention to ruin him.

He’s where you expected him to be, sat on your bed like it’s just as well as his. 

“Your boots,” you scold as you settle down next to him, moving his knee aside. He ignores you and presses his mask up to your neck eagerly, listening to the hot throb of blood. 

“You missed me,” he says. His hands crawl over your thighs and then grab for your own, but you take them and return them to his lap. He’s disappointed, but you give him a reassuring smile before darting down and retrieving a plain box from beneath your bed. It’s only really distinguishable by the white crust of a sticker you unsuccessfully tried to scratch away. He tilts his head at the sound of items shifting inside. 

You retract the lid and unfold a layer of crushed gift paper.

He laughs noiselessly when he sees the strap, but then falls still, fingers curling in on his palms. A second later, Danny is back to clawing at you, shuddering, encouraging your hands to search him. 

“You’re so impolite tonight,” you say even as you relent, rubbing up and down his strong thighs.

“Hurry, hur—ry,” he beckons, the syllables drawn out and curling mockingly. 

He lets you wrestle him into a position you can work with—pushed onto his stomach and knees, hips tilted up so you can work off his belt. 

“Ahaha.”

His laugh is airy but cruel and makes you feel like the exposed one as you tug his pants down to his knees, boxers next. The sound stutters to a stop when you run your thumb up the curve of his thigh. 

“Ah.”

You graze his hole and he jerks forward, sucking in his gut and holding the breath. It would be hard to get any amount in when he’s so tense. You stroke his thigh as you lean away. He tries to play it off with a laugh but there’s no air in his lungs to produce the sound.

You reach for your nightstand, pushing past the clutter and unopened mail, as well as your own embarrassment, to tug open the drawer. Various things are rattled; pill bottles that couldn’t find space in the bathroom, your hairbrush, loose pens, dog-eared sticky notes, and lube. It’s new and still has the plastic seal on it, which you pick at before successfully peeling off. 

You hear him sneer.

“What?” You turn to him, accusatory, but the mask only stares back, and you can envision the amused smile just beneath it. 

You pour a quarter-sized portion into your hand, then more, and rub it vigorously between your palms in an attempt to warm it up. Still, he flinches when you push a single, slick finger in his entrance. He flexes his hands into fists then lets them uncurl. 

“Cold?” you ask, sympathetically but entertained. Now presuming the role of the voyeur, you almost get how he finds satisfication in watching someone squirm, just as he does, delightfully, under you. 

His eerie giggling makes it hard to focus as you push further in in the smallest of increments, waiting between each for a sign to stop. It never comes, even as he twists and huffs and even laughs or sobs at one point. You’re about to pause and ask outright, but he leans back into your hand and snorts.

“Get back to it.” It sounds like a threat disguised as a suggestion, but you know that’s just how he is; he’s not one to earnestly request something, he needs to sound like he’s still the one in control. 

“Are you asking for more?” you stop and laugh. You take him by the thigh and work the soft flesh under your thumbs. You’re surprised it’s so soft and not rugged and shredded up with the same distinctive, serrated scars that you’ve seen all up his forearms. There are a few thin, almost white streaks of scarred skin, like long, stray stitches, which you give special attention—otherwise, the skin not tight with muscle is soft and welcoming.

The pace of his breathing waxes as he tries to even it out. You retract your finger to push in two. He’s silent, this time, but squrims still, rocking himself with the motion of your hand, mimicking the curve and pull upward as you curl your digits. 

You continue like this for another minute until you feel him fully untense, a little put off by his impossible noiselessness. You focus on the pattern of your bed sheets warping as he twists them into his palms in fistfuls. The wood of your bed thumps like a steady, solid heartbeat.

He leans forward, away from you, initially you think it was too much and go to apologize, but a second later you feel him press a knife to your side. It’s a somewhat funny sight, the way he’s resting on his side, leisurely, robe flipped up to his waist and a knife angled almost casually up your abdomen. 

“Get it on, put it in.” For someone with such an expansive and colorful vocabulary over the phone, he’s notably more blunt in person. Sometimes you’re thankful for this, other times it’s that much more unnerving. 

You laugh, mostly, as he guides you back onto your knees. It’s still a real threat, but somehow you’re comfortable enough to get in a chuckle at his expense. You take the time to peel off your shirt, tastefully slowly, but don’t extend the same tentativeness to your pants when the blade sinks further into your side (not yet breaking skin, but intending to remind you of the sting of it).

Dealing with the many bands of the strap is not such a graceful scene, fiddling a lot less patiently with buckles. Now he laughs, slower and much more cruel. 

“Pretty thing,” he says, strung out, maybe mocking. You take him by the hip and he shuts right up.

You turn him so both knees meet the mattress and push him down, forwards, onto his elbows, filling in behind him. 

“Tear me up, get in my guts,” he encourages. Such a grotesque way to put it, but there’s a pleasant hotness in your core as you drag your hand up his thighs and watch him watch you. 

There’s no noise when you first enter, but it all comes when he must, inevitably, release the breath that had coiled high in his chest. Half a cry, a dying snicker, a sound of excited pain, he howls and cries.

You rock and drag against him until you find a comfortable nook to saddle up against him and he shudders. 

“You’re doing good,” you say as you stroke his thigh. He hisses at you and laughs when you’re taken aback, but it looks as if the handle of the knife will snap in his hand with how fiercely he clenches it. 

Soon you have to hold him by the thighs to keep him in place as you distinguish a steady rhythm, fucking into him, forgivingly, for now. Your own breaths start to match his own, heavy and tight, a deepening pressure low in your belly, in your guts. 

He’s forgotten the knife as he grips instead at the pillow. The mask looks back at you offering no guidance, no context, but his dizzy mewling tells of sickening pleasure; heaving and panting already but unrelenting, fucking himself back against you even as his head spins and vulnerable insides burn. He loves the ache and the fullness, he thinks, as his eyes sting with smoldering tears, thankfully hidden. It’s nearly as intimate as a knife. 

Your face begins to glitter with sweat. It takes more than a moment for the both of you to adapt a shared rhythm. You tangle your fingers deep into his robe until you’re pulling on the tattered coattails like reigns. The friction you get in return as you fuck him is slight, nothing susbtantial on its own, yet still manages to burn tenderly. Sweat glosses his thighs, your brow, the line of your collarbone. 

“I thought about you inside of me, before,” he confesses dizzily. You’re not surprised. You lean further over him and bring a hand around the back of his neck and hood, adjusting him to your liking.

“Not always in this way,” he adds with laughter. You must not get it, perplexed by the statement and the heaving chuckling he incites in himself. A long, deep thrust chokes it out of him like a strike to the back.

You think he’s shaking, but the darkness of the night does wonders to hide him, quilts of shadows draped where his own robes don’t hide scarred skin. Your fingers twitch (the want to pry his mask away), but you only dig them further into the nook of his hips against his thighs. 

You can’t decide if his eyes would be wide, all watery whites, or heavy and lidded, drowned in the color of blown pupils. You press the hand on his neck further in, curl your fingers around it so the nails nearly meet. The excited flutter of blood in his veins beats against your fingertips.

“You could kill me,” the Ghostface says, “and I’d—ahahaha.”

Does he find himself so amusing, or is it your puzzlement he finds entertaining? He does love those stern, tight looks you give him. He groans. 

Abruptly, you ask, “am I the only one you do this with?” You say this from both a feeling of confidence, of ownership, but also with genuine interest and shame over it all. That most others who touch him must not live long after, yet time and time again he is in your house at your allowance. His hands, with blood soaked into the creases, yield to you or even move to stroke you. 

He’s said nothing in the moments since your question. He appears to, at this point, be fixated on the ceiling, lost in the motion, the crude sound of skin, the pleasure. You tighten your grip and hope it leaves aching marks. 

The Ghostface grabs suddenly for you. His knees jerk inward, a keening, stretched sound curling from his tensed gut. He shakes relentlessly and sobs just as much, clawing at your thighs, gripping them, attempting to twist into the flesh. You rub his sides and his arms and the tight muscle of his back, fucking again, hard and thorough and good into his hole. You see the white catch on his legs, on your bedsheets; the sensation carves into him, all too much, but he still attempts to draw you further inside. It’s all raw and romantically, scarily visceral. His own panting has made the inside of his mask boil, and his eyes steam with tears and euphoria and body heat. You feel so deep in him, but he wants to drag you farther. 

Then he collapses. Heaving and gasping like a sailor washed ashore, coughing out spit but laughing still. You pull out slowly, an inch or so at a time, watching the twitch in his legs.  

“Thank you,” he rasps, mask buried into your pillow, hands back to pulling at the sheets. Tears and sweat run splotchy streaks down your pillowcase. It was about time to change them out, anyways. 

“You did good,” you reply, softly.

He motions you over. You oblige, essentially, shuffling next to him. He grabs you by the back of your neck like you had done to him, fingers pinching between the discs in your neck. He takes you down next to him, not an embrace, exactly, but so you both lie there, faces in your pillows, breathing heavily. You have to angle your hips uncomfortably to the side, lying crooked, panting as if it was you entirely, in body, inside of him. You look deserted, lost in your own house, bedroom, tangled bedsheets. 

“What do I get back?” you try to say, but well accustomed to his routine, you know he’s swift and curt in his departure once he gets his relief. You can only sigh out, before you lift yourself to slide out of all the straps of the harness.

“You’re the only one to live this long,” it says, not the mask with the frigid expression, but the man underneath. He says it with his own tongue and lungs and throat. You raise your brows at him, before you realize it must be an answer to your earlier question. He chuckles hoarsely as the realization breaks across your face, nightly frost cracking under morning sunlight. The declaration must not have been meant to be sweet, even with his bizarre, off-putting idea of romance—it’s cruel, but a reminder, never a threat, seemingly. 

You stand. The Ghostface follows you with his eyes (you think; he doesn’t move, but you know the distinct feeling of his dedicated gaze.)

You’ve discarded the toy on your desk chair to clean when you forget and stumble across it later and retreat into your bathroom. Drowning yourself in yellow, humming light, you duck under your sink into the wooden cabinet to fish for a washcloth. You avoid your reflection in the cloudy square of a bathroom mirror and duck back out the door once you’ve snagged one. You return after soaking it in warm water to see the intruder has sat up and saddled himself on the edge of your bed, hunched over like someone wounded. He sees you approaching and the off-white cloth balled in your hand. He used to flee before you would ever get to this point, but it appears either he’s come to trust you or has resigned himself to your coddling. 

You clean him up, dabbing up his thighs and the back as well, blotting away sweat and stealing glances at shadowed skin all torn with intersecting scars. It’s nearly intimate.

“Where do you go, after this?” you ask. He turns the mask to you. Silver catches on the rim from the moonlight that pushes through your window shades, blue on the white of his ghastly faux face. 

“You want dinner, too?” he asks, another joke. A pause starts, so instead he pushes his mask up against your nose and the angle of your jaw, almost a kiss but cold and momentary. He stands, pants and the assemblage of all those belts and straps back in place, all black as the stillness of your dark bedroom again. 

“Maybe,” you answer after what is surely an inappropriately long duration, but you thought about it, about the premise of something so casual and gentle, it nearly seems more intimate than what had just unfolded, and what will and will again when he makes his next appearance, something that has become nearly weekly. It doesn’t fit him, the image of a relaxed night out, of genuine tenderness, it can’t. 

There’s a second where he thinks about it, then he simply chuckles.

“When will I see you again?” you ask before he can fully move to leave. He looks at you and you know instantly and with certainty that a wide smile is pulling across his face.

“Check the news tomorrow, yeah?” 

He’s swift to your window, pulling it open with little resistance and hiking up a leg to set a heel on the frame. The sting of cold nighttime seeps in rapidly, a torrent that’s practically glacial on your burning body.

“You should’ve locked it,” The Ghostface says, low and suddenly serious, with what he must believe to be dark humor.  “Haven’t you been reading the headlines?”

Was thinking of you, you wish to say, but the words never leave your mouth, just jitter on your tongue, rearranging themselves like perching birds. You only smile, far less exposing than flustered words might be. He hoists himself out of the window and into the dark expanse of the backyard (it’s only a short drop, but the night appears to consume him whole, bones and all). His departure is somehow quieter than even the distant, clicking chorus of crickets and slowly churning wind. 

He emerges from the restroom, only halfway in the doorway. You then notice the array of cleaning products at his feet. Bags of powder and unlabeled spray bottles, a collection of brushes and ratty sponges. He’s even fetched the bottle of white vinegar you keep above the oven. Cornstarch, talcum powder… he notices your eyes wandering and steps forward, one hand still clutching the bathroom wall, out of view.

He turns to look at a clock that isn’t in view, then settles on you, fixing a sweet smile on his face.

“Welcome home,” he acknowledges. He frantically whips a hand side to side when you step forward.

“You’re home early,” you say, attempting to peer past him, “what’re you doing?”

You take note of the glossy gloves and apron he’s wearing, the hem wet.

“You were complaining that the tub was pretty nasty, and it was starting to irritate me, too,” Danny explains, appearing shy, boyish. He goes to scratch at the back of his neck but the unexpectedly damp rubber of the gloves makes him flinch. He returns his hand to his side, before he thinks to pretend to fumble with the bow of the apron.

He’s always been prone to go on random cleaning sprees, and takes advantage of the burst of motivation to give just about everything a good wiping down.

“Ah,” you breathe out, as if relieved, and smile appreciatively at him as you nudge past towards your bedroom. After peeling your socks off and heaving your work bag up onto your bed, you walk back out into the hall, only to be rushed along by a mildly frazzled Danny.

“I was going to make you dinner…” he explains as you arrive at the mess in the kitchen. He takes a second to push cookware back into the depths of a cupboard.

“Baked penne,” he finishes a second later, straightening with a huff. He looks sheepish and young when he turns to look at you and smile smally.

“Oh, Danny…” You feel your previously tart mood sweeten a little. He’s never been a brilliant cook, but he puts in more effort than you know you have.

“I’d feel bad to make you cook for me,” you say, turning to him as he swoops you into a close hug. “‘S fine,” he smiles into the crook of your neck, crooked nose in your shoulder, then pulls away to shoo you towards the living room. (Was it always crooked? You steal a glance at his face, a waxy blue blooming under the skin of the bridge of his nose. A tenderly recent bruise.)

“Have a seat, I’ll make you some tea then finish dinner.”

He hums as he leads you along to sit, recovering the remote from the seat cushion to change the channel just as the Ghostface mask blinks on screen with a red banner of text you don’t get to finish reading. More deaths linked to Ghostface killer after—

You remark how nervous the recent murders have made you, and Danny says nothing. You hear him pad back over to the kitchen as he retrieves a kettle. The kitchen faucet croaks, sprays water, the television is playing some home renovation show. You find your eyes wandering to the window and the dark, indistinct landscape beyond, focusing on movement that’s not there. Watery, shifting blackness. Danny laughs a short laugh at your worry, apparently unbothered. He never said anything on the matter of the Ghostface killer, but seems comfortable enough still leaving the sliding glass doors unlocked no matter how much you pester him.

He returns with your tea shortly after, and to press a chaste kiss to the top of your head.

“Dinner will take a little longer,” he explains apologetically. Pauses. “Want me to rub your back?”

You snort and kick your feet up onto the cluttered coffee table. He’s serious, though, and you give a noncommittal shrug. He seems to be in a good mood now that he’s recovered from your unexpectedly early return, however. His cheeks are creased with a fat smile. He strokes your cheek as he leaves, cold skin, not rubber—when did he shed the gloves?

On the stovetop, he sets a tall pot of water to boil, then disappears into the hall. The light of the bathroom clicks off, then the hallway light, and he appears from the dark doorway like a wraith from frothy mist. It still spooks you how silent he can be.

“You gonna sit down?” you ask, feeling a little useless as you watch on from your place on the couch.

“As soon as I get this in the oven,” Danny says, popping open a jar of variously seasoned pasta sauce.

He comes back around to refill your tea. It’s weirdly domestic seeing him like this, brandishing a teapot painted with shiny hummingbirds and lilies, in an apron, juggling dinner and cleaning. You smile to yourself. As he retracts, you reach out to rub the dent in his nose, to which he stills. He lifts his free hand to touch it for himself, feeling out the bent cartilage.

“How’d that happen, Danny?” you ask, turning fully to him. Your hands twitch, wanting to take his face into your palms.

“I don’t know, I didn’t notice that,” he replies, fingertips still lingering on the area. He should’ve said he hit it on the counter, he thinks too late. He turns away and towards the kitchen, both hands on the base of the teapot. You don’t get to see his wide eyes, a tremble in his hands that disturbs the tea. The scalding ceramic sears his palm. He almost tosses the teapot onto the counter and turns over his hand, the skin there all red and irritated. He forgot to put the cozy on. It’s still in a moving box with all those hand-embroidered dish towels.

Danny manifests by your side to place an innocently-intentioned kiss at the base of your neck. The skin of it stings with goosebumps from his cold lips. Still, you lean back into him.

“You look so nice tonight, today.”

You don’t feel like it, feeling a little gross—if anything— clammy at the fingers and with sweat at your neck and forehead, but he reassures you with a torrent of kisses.

“You always manage to be stunning,” he insists as he draws back. The way his eyes stay intently on your face, you believe that he does indeed see something in you.

“Dunno how you think that,” you say, but softly and with affection. You tug him close so that he stays a moment longer.

When you finish your second mug of tea, he swoops in in an instant to claim it from you and runs it under hot water in the sink. He stays there for an extra minute, turning both his hands over multiple times under the flow of water, even as his skin stings and blushes. He picks out crusted blood from beneath a nail with a tight scowl. He worries over if there’s anything else he missed.

Dinner goes into the oven, (it’ll be forty minutes) and now he’s just gotta confine you to the front of the house. On cue, you tug at the hem of your scratchy polo and stand.

“I feel so gross,” you laugh a little, but you still manage to be unbearably pretty, he insists in his head. “I’m gonna hop in the shower.”

You start over to the hall, but Danny quickly encircles you in his arms from behind, pulling you tight to his torso. His thumb rubs circles on your belly, masking the flicker of fear as perhaps excitement to be with you.

“I’ll run a bath for you, alright? You should rest,” he suggests, and when you hesitate he strains his head over your shoulder so you can see his concern. You smile, none the wiser.

“Alright,” you give in, a pause where you wanted to say more, then slip into your bedroom to shuck off your clothes.

Danny listens to you sort through drawers on the other side of the wall as he steps into the backroom. He thought he had another hour. He’s usually not so careless, doing everything, even what was previously unplanned, on a schedule to which he is unquestionably loyal. The time change threw him off, if only he had cared to fix the clocks, he thinks bitterly as he scrubs away the rest of the lines of blood that trail to the bath’s drain. The red goes down with a spume of bath water.

The smell of so many intense cleaning products used to make his eyes water, but now he can withstand the artificial, sour lavender and coppery tang. You always complain lightheartedly when he cleans, but you don’t appear to think much more about it. He rinses the tub multiple times over before he actually draws you the bath he promised. While you’re still occupied in your shared room, he returns the supplies back to the area under the sink in the kitchen. He’ll have to wait to dispose of the gloves, now that you’re home.

Still, he feels floaty from the kill, having to force away the too-wide smile from his mouth. He sucks on the wound on the inside of his mouth from when he bit down from excitement. It’s still fresh and raw. He swallows blood. You’re attentive enough to have noticed his crooked nose, but somehow not the scratch marks on his wrist which he attempts to hide by tugging down his shirt sleeve. It will be a pain to deal with, but that’s for later down the line.

Steam curls up from the sheeny water. He pours in a cap-full of bubble bath that works instantly, giving rise to sweetly-smelling, pink soap. He stirs the water with a hand—it’s only warm, but the shallow marks on his wrist sting slightly. He could do with a thorough shower of his own. You enter and pull a suitable towel from its hook, joining him beside the bath.

He looks at you and smiles, rises, then hugs you close. You swat him.

“Wait till I’m dressed, maybe,” you chuckle, but you let him rest his head on your shoulder and trace the slope of your collarbone. You thumb away the irritated tears that wet your eyes. You don’t get how he stands the smell.

“I’m so lucky to have you,” he says, entirely earnest. He is. He loves you, he’s pretty sure. Your lips lift in a smile and you stroke his shoulder. You want to say you are too, that you’re so grateful for him, but by the time you decide on the words it feels inappropriately late.

“You’re in a good mood,” you observe, shifting so you can look at him. His smile lines have become more prominent since the two of you got together. Comparatively, he always notes how your eyes glitter more around him.

“You’re home,” he replies; his reasoning. He hugs you again, taking you in, and turns back to the tub to turn the water off just as you step in.

One careful foot then the other, then you let yourself slide down to sit. Warm, floral water foams around you. You sigh contentedly.

“I’ll set the table,” Danny says. He squeezes your hand and lifts it from the water to look it over, running his fingers along your knuckles, along the path of the lines in your palm. Then he stands and leaves.

You know it’s not gonna have miraculously manifested in the five minutes since he last asked, but you do so anyway, just to sate his irritation. You squint at the screen. Three endlessly pulsing lines tell you you’re still without signal. You tuck your flip phone away into your jacket pocket, your hands following, seeking warmth in the depths of your coat. Your fingers are beginning to lose feeling and your joints feel frozen over and solid.

It’s poor Frank, though, who’s tragically underdressed and shivering like a leaf fighting a storm in his ratty hoodie. His old running shoes are swamped with wet snow, fingerless gloves leaving his digits exposed to the cold. You come up behind him, pulling him into a hug against your front.

“Can’t we just go back inside?” you plead. The bridge of his nose is burning red, flakes of frost caught on his light eyelashes. He replies with a short, indecisive noise.

“Aw, Frankie, you’re shaking.”

You pull him tighter to your chest, attempting to stop his awful shuddering. He leans into you, considering your invitation. He’s not gonna make any progress on the car while it’s still actively snowing, realistically. The weather doesn’t look like it is going to let up anytime soon; the sky is as blinding and unendingly white as the frost it pelts down on your chilly faces.

Frank gives in. He trudges back up the hill with you and clambers inside the main lobby of the resort. When you’d first worked your way onto the premises, all of the doors had been propped open. Clearly the workers hadn’t foreseen the troublesome weather when they packed up for the week, so a crust of snow has collected around the outskirts of the room, piling up in the open doorways.

As Frank goes around shutting the doors, he attempts to shovel out the remaining frost with his boots. You help him scoop somewhere around half of it out and back into the wintery landscape outside before the cold really gets to you and you collapse by the blazing fireplace. You burrow underneath a heap of leftover blankets and call out for Frank, painfully alone on the couch by the twisting fire.

Frank shuts the last door and sighs, loud. Outside, merciless winds pound against the doors and press up against the building, sunken in the depths of snow. He marches over to join you by the fireplace, and you tug him beneath the blankets with you. He’s so cold you almost shove him right back out, but instead you take him in your arms sympathetically.

“You’re gonna get frostbite…” you say as your fingers tangle with his somewhere in the depths of your mess of blankets. Red burns up the fat of his cheeks and the bridge of his nose, crooked from a strike to the face.

“I might,” he laughs back, his chuckle ending with a shudder. He hisses in a breath and scoots closer to the fire, freeing his hands from yours to present them to the warmth of the flames. He turns his palms over, sighing with sweet relief, waggling his fingers until they wake up. At least his mood hasn’t soured, you think with relative hopefulness. You’ll do your best to salvage this impromptu date.

“You hungry?” you ask him. You lean against him, rubbing his side. He considers it.

“I’ll be fine,” he finally says back, but you can tell by his drifting eyes that the topic of food has his mind wandering, daydreaming of warm, fat slices of bread and buttery sauces and hearty soups. There might as well be a little thought bubble with a plate, fork and knife bobbing above his head.

You know from poking around before that there’s a community kitchen in one of the side-rooms here on the main floor, so, getting an idea, you shuffle out from under the blankets and stand.

“I’ll be right back,” you promise Frank with a smile. Thankfully, most of the feeling in your legs has returned so you can at least manage to stumble over to the kitchen like a newborn foal on its ungainly legs.

Inside the kitchen, it’s unsurprisingly empty. They must’ve cleared out all the perishable food items, because all that’s left is crumpled bags of microwavable popcorn and stale packets of chips. With enough rifling through the cabinets you score an unopened box of hot chocolate mix. Sadly, there’s no whipped cream to be found, but there is a bag of mini marshmallows, the open end rolled and clipped. All things considered, this has been a pretty successful raid, and you set out to secure two mugs.

Thankfully, it appears all the silverware is untouched, so you quickly find two thick, ceramic mugs. One is painted with brightly smiling snowmen swathed in lovingly detailed scarves and mittens. The other one is plain. You reserve the undecorated one for Frank, as funny as it would be.

You fill both with hot water and stir in the mix, the marshmallows added in last. It smells sweet, and like home.

Grinning with this hopeful turn of events, you make your way back over to Frank, who has stolen all the blankets for himself in your absence. He opens up one end for you as you approach, however.

“Lucky us,” you remark as you present him with his mug. He perks up and takes it in his hands, warming them on the hot ceramic.

“Where’d you find this?” he pipes up, voice noticeably softening. He stares at the drink almost apprehensively, blowing away an ascending curl of steam.

“In the kitchen. They still have some stuff leftover in there.”

You beam back at him, proud of your find, then lift the mug carefully to your mouth and take a ginger sip. It’s warm and rich, and you hum appreciatively, wiping away the ring of chocolate that stains your mouth. It’s just not as good as it is when made with milk and fluffy whipped cream, but you worked with what you had, and it’s still pleasantly filling.

Frank sips away meagerly at his own beverage, making sure to savor it in mild portions. You laugh. He glares at you.

You notice he’s still shaking fiercely, so you tuck him snugly into your arm and pull another blanket over the two of you, stuffing it up to your chins. He’s still for a moment before he lets himself lean into your touch, chasing your warmth. You brush softening frost from his hair and shoulders, crystals catching on your fingers.

“…Sorry I fucked this up,” he croaks out. His jaw clenches shut so hard it’s nearly audible. It’s Frank, so you know he doesn’t want any reassurance, or to dwell on the topic, so instead you rub his back soothingly. The muscles there are drawn tight and tense, but you ease him into loosening up.

You kiss the space behind his ear then sympathetically rub the tear on the helix of it.

“I don’t deserve you,” Frank says as you stroke the hair at the top of his neck. You can’t tell if it’s from the cold, but his eyes are watery.

“Maybe you don’t,” you smile.

He doesn’t look at you, but cranes his arm back as if drawing an arrow and rams his elbow into your side with lethal precision, digging between your ribs. You sputter out both a laugh and a wail, clutching your mug securely. A few drops dot the blanket. You elbow him back.

“Asshole,” he sneers, setting his mug aside, then turning to you, face even redder. He guides your hand to place your drink beside you, then finds the collar of your jacket and reels you forward. His cold lips press against yours. Instinctively, your eyes close, head cocking to accommodate his. You feel the scar that runs through his lip (healed mostly, but still present), raising a hand to rub at his cheek. You’re a bit distracted, so your judgment isn’t the sharpest currently, but you think the roaring outside has mostly ceased. The snow falls gently, like glitter settling in a snowglobe.

She doesn’t end up touching the shotgun collar much. She tightens it by a hair's breadth then hands it back over to John. Whoever will be the one to wear it will live if they want to, she thinks as she sets it into a thick box, sliding the lid into place.

You… knew vaguely of Amanda’s work. You knew she didn’t especially want you involved, and though sometimes it felt like she was pushing you away, she made it well-known that it was for the best. She’d been super spacey lately, though. She comes home late and sleeps late. She wakes up frequently and you lay in bed listening to her pace around the cramped kitchen of your apartment. You trace the dark folds beneath her tired eyes when you lie together on the couch and she flinches as if startled from her thoughts, or doused in droves of frigid water.

That night you had planned an outing at the drive-in theater in town. It had been difficult finding the time to set aside for each other, but the two of you settled on a horror movie. A rerun of a classic you both adore. It’s been a while since either of you went out for a film, and you thought that it, along with an armsful of snacks would do her good to unwind. You would stop at a restaurant on the way there for take-out, and arrive early enough to score a good spot with a good view. It was going to be great. The entire day you were especially energetic, clocking out of work with the biggest smile fixed on your face.

As you start up the winding staircase of the apartment building, you notice the halls are unnaturally empty. You look over your shoulder at a flickering shadow as you turn the key into the slot and enter your shared apartment.

Instantly, your heart slumps. It’s only your pair of running shoes by the door, and the lights are all off. The jacket and blankets you folded for your outing are still set neatly on the couch by the entryway.

You drop your bag by your room, which is similarly empty. The sheets of your bed are disrupted, covers thrown to one side of the mattress. Your eyes slink to the closet-sized bathroom in the room, where light leaks through the open door. You flick the lights off, your reflection in the bathroom mirror drenched in blue darkness.

Your phone buzzes. You fish it out from your pocket and slide it open. You try not to be disappointed. Two more consecutive dings sound. You click on her name in your contacts and open the messages.

Out late with work tonight, I’m so so sorry.

Maybe we can go this weekend. I hate to cancel at the last second but it’s important.

Love you.

You sniffle, fingers curling over the sides of the phonecase, shaking. You don’t know why you’re crying. You know you’re upset, but this isn’t something to cry over. Still, glittering tears pool in your vision and splatter across the screen. Using your palm and sleeve, you wipe away the wetness. You tuck your phone away and unzip your jacket, tossing it onto your desk chair. Your shoes come next, abandoned at the foot of the bed as you stumble out of them.

It’s no big deal, but Amanda always stuck to her word, and you have barely seen her at all as of late. She’s been distant, even her sweetest touches seeming unsure or rushed. Her hugs are brief and uncommitted, holding you uncertainly like handling a snake.

You sink into her side of the bed, taking up a fetal position, sinking into the ripples of cottony fabric. Her warmth is still there, dissolving but unmistakable. It makes you feel worse, so you roll over, retreating to your side and beneath the thick covers. Your eyes flutter closed, tears webbing in your wet lashes. You wipe them away too.

Amanda definitely should have known when John had suggested she should join him in observing his newest subject. She was used to being assigned projects then working on them independently, so it’s rare she’s involved with his less elaborate trials.

Still, it’s 11:09 pm and she’s in a thin jacket and baggy jeans standing outside the backdoor of a decommissioned testing facility. She digs in the collar of her t-shirt and fetches a key from around her neck. It slots into the lock of the grimy double-doors. The click as she turns it is like a gunshot in the silence of the alleyway. She opens the doors and passes inside. The interior is cold, made up of winding, frigid halls and grubby tiled floors. Nauseous yellow stains and shallow scuff marks streaking the walls. An itch crawls up her throat like the scraggly legs of a spider.

At intervals are yellow-ish windows that peer into undecorated, clinical-looking rooms. Folding chairs around folding tables, open cabinets, piles of clipboards and the cases of pens.

Amanda scans over the numbers on the placards that are to the right of each door. 304… 305…

She comes to another pair of double doors, sickly, almost jaundiced lights coming from the windows. She sees a long meeting table, a ring of folding chairs, another window on the opposite side. John’s slumped, sagging figure is seated by the glass panel, looking away. Robed in black with sinister red accents. She feels underdressed, not having thought to bring her cloak, the stagnant cold of the building already working its way into her bones.

He doesn’t turn to acknowledge her as she enters. Amanda follows his unwavering stare to the room on the other side of the glass. Another chair settled in front of a pillar. There’s a drain in the center of the room, with dark stains running to it in dried streams. A television is set up across from the chair. Her eyes drift to the VHS player.

“Who?” she wants to ask, but her painted lips stay sealed and in a resting scowl. She hears a set of thuds from somewhere nearby in the building. John’s eyes lift slightly. He looks over his narrow shoulder to Amanda, something like recognition on his pale, drooping features, all a washed-out yellow like the fluorescent lights. Understanding, she takes the seat next to him. Anxiety torches her insides. She crosses her arms protectively across her chest and attempts to quell her stuttering heart.

On the other side of the glass, Hoffman shoves through a door using the back of his shoulder. He’s hoisting a limp body up to his chest. As he passes inside and under the faintly pulsing lights, she sees your unconscious face on the body he’s carrying. Metal wails against tile as Amanda shoots to stand, chair shoved behind her, clattering into the table. John blinks impassively.

Her throat dries up, and though she’s barely processed the situation she’s shaking horribly. Her mouth is moving, but it’s only her pulse she hears thundering in her ears.

“John,” she shrieks, scaring herself. He breathes deeply, his glassy, sunken eyes fixated on the window. She turns back to Hoffman, watching as he lifts you up onto the chair, tucking your limbs back into place. A moment later your arms slide back to swing at your sides. He scoffs noiselessly and tugs them behind the back of the chair, tying them with a thick rope that he loops over itself twice. She catches your eyelids twitch.

“John,” she sneers, standing in front of him now, arms out and raised, “John, what the fuck?!”

He cocks his head up at her. Her eyes are alight with fury, her veins too, where blood boils and seethes, feverish. But she’s shaking. Shaking the way she did on the day of her first test, when she stood outside, shielding herself from the assaulting daylight, her dark hair stuck to her face and damp with sweat, soaked in blood up to her elbows, her eyes so wide with fear. She looks just as she did then, vulnerable and terrified.

“Amanda,” he finally addresses her.

“Open that box over there,” he orders, but it’s weirdly soft. He nods over at a metal rolling cart. On top of it is a thick cardboard box. She knows what’s in it.

“Don’t involve them in this,” she pleads. She shakes to her fingers, to her neck and knees. A headache pounds behind her eyes, throbbing. “Please.”

Her voice is fractured and nearly silent.

“The box, please,” John prompts again. She stands there for a moment, silence stretching the second on infinitely until it hurts to behold. It floods her lungs like a toxic gas, burns her eyes, thickens the air. She turns slowly and steps over to the box. She pries the lid off and sets it aside delicately, like it’s dangerous. The tang of aged steel overtakes her smell.

She lifts the shotgun collar out of its container. It feels so much heavier than before and takes a great deal to carry back over to John. She stands there in front of him like she isn’t sure what to do, but in reality she’s just stalling. Her muscles burn and shake. John only nods solemnly and it nearly breaks her.

She steps into the room but sticks close to the door, like entering a shark’s tank. For another painful moment she stands there before walking to the center of the room, shoving past Hoffman intentionally with a low snarl she hopes John doesn’t catch. He stands behind her, but she sends him an intense glare that gets him to ease off her and back off somewhat.

Amanda, holding her crown of thorns, stares at it. She’s scared. She watches her own chest rise and fall gradually with each breath, just to remind herself that she’s indeed alive in this moment, that it’s real. There’s the sound of ticking somewhere in the room, but she hadn’t seen a clock when she entered. It’s like a heartbeat in the walls. Her head hurts. Someone is thrusting a screwdriver into her skull and twisting it around.

“C’mon, Young,” Hoffman hisses over her shoulder. She wants to sock him in the jaw, maybe dislocate it too, afterward, but she knows John is watching. She seethes silently instead.

“Or I’ll do it myself.”

The threat finally pushes her to action. She lifts the collar over your head, careful as she rests it on your shoulders and around your neck. You sink under the weight, but remain asleep. The lock clicks securely. She knows her way around all the mechanisms, but she’s still terrified it will randomly trigger and (although empty) ignite your face.

Hoffman shuffles behind her and appears at her side, shoving a pack of bullets into her hands. Five, wide, shimmering bullets. Their exterior is cold, almost biting her palms.

Amanda methodically slides each shotgun bullet into place, clasping each tightly in its holder. Each click is deafening. She steps back, breathes in, breathes out, stale air that’s acidic in her throat. None of this feels real to her yet.

She leans forward, her eyes fixed on your face. You look unfittingly peaceful, and it tears her apart entirely. She knows the terror she felt when she woke up in the same situation as you will soon. She knows how awful and raw it is, and she aches to comfort you, pull you from your binds and collar; she wants to promise you a safety that she just can’t.

Her forehead meets yours. Your breaths are slow and even. Hers tremble. She closes her eyes and can almost pretend for a brief moment that you’re at home in eachothers arms. The bitter air, the lights burning the back of her neck, Hoffman’s figure lurking over her shoulder; she can only hold the image for a moment before it slips through her fingers and she’s back in the testing chamber.

As she pulls away, she strokes your cheek. The rough pad of her thumb traces over your bottom lip, then cradles your face.

“I’m sorry,” Amanda can only wheeze. The cruel irony of it all isn’t lost on her, and she wants to tear her skin off, claw out her throat, any pain to relieve her from reality. It’s her trap around your neck. A week before she had it on her desk, all her drafts and blueprints stacked to one side. She pressed the butt of the screwdriver to her chin, decides, no need to mess with it, and set it aside. It was swiftly packed away as you appeared in the doorway to her workshop, summoning her for dinner. She smiled at you tiredly; you smiled back sympathetically.

“A lot of work?”

“You about done?” Hoffman asks dryly, not so much a question. Her fingers fall from your face. She stands, and when she turns she doesn’t look back, elbowing past Hoffman again, searching for John—the window is one way glass though, and so she’s left alone in a room that’s not empty.

She pushes inside the observation room, keeping her stare on the gaps between the floor tiling, tracing along them with her eyes. Hoffman shuffles inside behind her, and she hears the lock slide into place. His heavy boots thud along the ground and out of sight. Her vision goes glassy, tears rimming her eyes. A few beads run down her cheeks and drop to the floor below. She’s holding back sobs in her chest; she’s scared of breathing, so she stands there, holding her breath until her lungs burn and her eyesight fogs further.

A = Aftercare (what they’re like after sex)

Weirdly antsy. He has a certain buzz to him, like that you get from a strong shot of coffee on an empty stomach. He’ll always try to lay with you for a bit after the fact, but he’ll eventually want to go leave to attend other unspecified matters. Sex wakes him up; he’ll usually be suddenly focused or energized and want to capitalize on this uncommon bout of momentum. If he’s stressed or overworked though, expect him to collapse into an eight hour sleep.

You usually end up smelling faintly of his woody cologne after sex, the expensive bottle he reserves for you. It’s a heavy leather scent, but it’s comforting, and you don’t usually mind.

When it comes to caring for you, he’s better at tending to you physically than pillow talk and sleepy chatter. He just can’t be vulnerable in that way, but he’ll see to every individual mark and imprint with care. He’ll want to lay for a bit, usually spooning you and stroking your hair. This is the most quiet you’ll ever see him; he says very little, just appreciates you with attentive eyes. Sometimes he strokes his fingers up and down your sides (you chide him for this though; his hands are always freezing). Even when he outwardly appears calm, you know there’s so much going on in his head, so it’s rare to catch him so genuinely placid. It doesn’t last too long, but it makes you appreciate him in a new way.

Danny might pop out a cigarette for a few short post-coital puffs, but he can manage without it if it bothers you.

If necessary, he’s fine with helping you wipe down with a washcloth, and if you suggest a shower he’ll always join you.

B = Body part (their favorite body part of theirs and also their partner’s)

Of yours; thighs, all the way and more. A thigh sort of guy first and foremost, through and through. When you’re together in private, it’s impossible for him to keep his hands off them. He paws at them and will subtly drag up the hem of your skirt/shorts, will drag his nails up them, rub circles. Sometimes he grabs handfuls of your thighs or leaves purposely overt hand marks across the skin there. He also loves dragging his knife up them, just barely ghosting the curve of the blade over your flesh. He’s also pretty handsy with your hips and always greets you by snatching them from behind and bringing you against him, shamelessly grinding against them.

For himself: his forearms and hands. They do a lot of the physical work, and their use shows in the well-defined muscle. He doesn't think about his own body much. He’s proud of his scars, though, and wears them like badges. If you ask, he’d tell you the story behind each and every significant mark.

C = Cum (anything to do with cum, basically)

On you, in you, anything you. If not inside for whatever reason, he’s just as happy to do so anywhere on you. It makes for spectacular photos, he claims. He takes a dozen for every possible angle, and they’ll eventually appear in your possession sometime down the line, a souvenir of your antics.

There’s really no tasteful way to put it—he has a lot in him, and he’s not satisfied unless he sees you dirtied with it. He could cum again just from seeing you in it.

D = Dirty secret (pretty self explanatory, a dirty secret of theirs)

He’s open with you to a fault when it comes to his sexual interests. You’re well aware of the pictures and have, at this point in your relationship, given the ok for him to indulge in it some. It’s not like he hides the fact, either way, leaving glossy polaroids tucked into your toolboxes or stuffed in the heel of your shoe for you to discover mid-trial. You’ll never get over the embarrassment of having to desperately attempt to rip apart the photograph of you red-faced with his hand shoved down your jeans, failing to, then trying successfully to burn it in one of many barrel fires, nearly poisoning yourself in the process.

Otherwise though, he’s a surprisingly huge masochist. He’ll subtly encourage you to rough him up, but can never bring himself to outright ask, finding it demeaning (and not in a fun way). He’ll ask you to tug him around a bit or strangle him or bruise him or whatever else, but it’s only ever been passing jokes to you, oblivious to the effect those fantasies have on him. He daydreams of you leaving marks up his neck and across his lips, of sweetly burning bruises and bloody noses, but these are personal visions. He finds himself disappointed when you brush off his suggestions with a laugh and not much further thought, but he’d still never be able to bring it up. He just can’t get over the idea of you using his knife to carve your name, maybe across the fat of his thigh or, boldly, across his chest. The mental image makes him pant. He wants to be yours in the way he considers you his.

E = Experience (how experienced are they? do they know what they’re doing?)

His history is complicated. He leaves it at that and you don’t pry any deeper than what he offers. If he is inexperienced, he doesn’t show it; he projects such a smug confidence that it seems like he knows what he’s doing, but you know him well enough to say he’s good at bullshitting his way through most things. His disarming self-assurance would have you believe you’re only another tally mark in an impressive body count. Either way, Ghostface doesn’t tell you, nor does he clarify if that body count is of the sexual variety or something a little more sinister (though ultimately in-character).

F = Favorite position (this goes without saying)

His personal favorite is anything up a wall, pinned or pressed up to a surface; he enjoys being in either position. He specifically likes to be behind you, arms snaked around your torso or gripping your hands. He also enjoys it when you cage him in a corner and trap his hands above his head by the wrists. Expect him to joke lots when in this scenario, but he always enjoys it and struggles to stay still. He’s so easy to excite.

You’ll find he’s actually very affectionate, just that he’s rough about it, usually without intending to be. He leaves a number of fingerprints bruised up your sides and collarbone. He gives you full permission to grab him and essentially manhandle him; he loves it, encouraging you with plenty of explicit comments and requests.

Overall, he’s all for anything as long as he’s close to you. If he could, he’d want to suffocate in you, lose his breath and go blue just kissing you.

G = Goofy (are they more serious in the moment? are they humorous? etc.)

He’s not goofy per-se, but animated and witty. Don’t expect him to play it straight; he’s quick to fill the possibility of silence with plenty of teasing and cruel jokes. It’s his way of flirting, though; he makes it so much worse by going on and on about how cute you look blushing like that. He’ll be grinning the entire time, and treats the experience like how he goes about most things in his life; with cold-hearted humor and a feeling of immortality.

H = Hair (how well groomed are they? does the carpet match the drapes? etc.)

Keeps himself remarkably well groomed. There’s really not a reason to (no one but you gets the chance to see what goes on under the cloak), so it’s out of personal preference. Not too much hair below the neck.

I = Intimacy (how are they during the moment? the romantic aspect)

How I see Ghostface is actually overwhelmingly affectionate and excitable. You’d never be able to teach him to keep his hands to himself; it’s fundamentally against his nature. He’s constantly all over you, and this is no different. His affection for you is hard to label, but could probably and most accurately be described as long-term infatuation. It has all the strength and uncomfortable intensity of a passing obsession, but stretched out for the duration of a relationship and with a wholehearted investment. Outsiders might at that point ask how it’s so different from love, but it would be naive to name it that. He’s fixated on you—he says he loves you, and somewhere in that heartless cavity in his chest he likely does; you just have to understand it’s in his own way, on his own terms. He’s a scarily good actor, making it a real hassle to discern when he’s being sincere, but you can assume he cares for you, or at least is attached to you in a fashion similar to care. Like a new pet or favorite toy. He’s constantly high on the excitement of the Honeymoon phase, long past the time it realistically ended.

His love is equatable to his touches; smothering, forceful, but disarmingly caring and tender.

This attitude carries over into fucking, and is really even multiplied. He’s always pressed so close to you with limbs in inter-weaving knots that sometimes you think he intends to fuse with you. Though he himself is quiet, his love is at a constant and overpowering volume. If you return his affection at all, you’ll find he’s prone to freezing up or retracting. Like most things, he only seems to accept intimacy on his terms, with his explicit control over the interaction.

J = Jack off (masturbation headcanon)

Does so more than the average person, but it doesn’t interfere with his work. It’s usually just to destress or clear up his mind if he finds himself distracted.

If he’s dating you, he sees no point (he just finds himself more frustrated than before, wanting the real thing, a pleasure specific to you that his hand can’t provide or scratch in the same way). If you’re away or simply not up to fuck, he may deal with it himself with the assistance of one of your borrowed articles of clothing. He’ll wash it for you before returning it, if it makes it any better.

K = Kink (one or more of their kinks)

Praise and humiliation in equal amounts. Giving or receiving, he has a dangerous way with words and knows how to use them against you in the best ways.

If praise is more your style, he’ll offer plenty of encouragement, cooing at you, stroking your cheeks, running more kisses down your jawline. He raves about how well you’re doing as he nuzzles his head in the space between your neck and shoulder, as he works you undone with his fingers.

He enjoys some for himself too, even if he may not know how to respond (nor request it, for that matter). It’s really up to you to pick up the pieces. He’s fun to praise, because whereas he has a solid defense system against any teasing (silence), compliments and affirmation really get to him. His voice will get all tight and his shoulders will tense, arms crossed tight across his chest, almost defensively. He’ll nod along like he’s unaffected and reply with curt “yeah”s and neutral hums, but it really does get under his skin delightfully.

You’ll have to wait until he’s in one of his softer moods, or he’ll just laugh off your attempts hard enough he has to mime wiping a tear.

He likes his degradation too, another thing he’ll receive as happily as he dishes it out. He could get off to any insults you hurl at him if he tried hard enough, but most of the time that effort doesn’t seem necessary; anything about you could get him going. Call him a creep or desperate and he happily agrees. “All for you,” he remarks adoringly.

L = Location (favorite places to do the do)

He could manage just about anywhere. He’s fond of lockers, forced up against you and vice versa. Feeling your open-mouthed breaths and hammering pulse excites him as much as a good chase does. As hot as he finds it, it’s still a bit messy, and you’ll find you only have such limited space to work with. You’ll have to prepare yourself for sore joints and fierce cramps on top of the inevitable vibrant hickeys and bruises. Otherwise, though, any surface he can hoist you onto or pin you to does well.

Prefers indoors, and in that case, he likes to have you up against a window. He grins at you, drooling, as red as you are, in the faint smears of your reflections.

M = Motivation (what turns them on, gets them going)

Anything about you, if in the right moment. He could be watching you relax and your shirt drifts slightly up your torso, exposing a sliver of midriff, and suddenly he’s red-faced and his heart is hammering. He’s always admiring you, anyways; it’s hard to escape his permanent gaze. Ghostface tells you how wild you make him, even when going about something terribly mundane, like laundry. “You’re such a tease,” he sighs, throbbing, pink little hearts practically visible in his eyes. “I’m just doing laundry, creep,” you shoot back, and flick him across the face with a washcloth. He pretends to be struck by an arrow, clutching his cold, callous heart.

He thinks you’re pretty, any angle, any moment—like a picture. You can bet he takes plenty, too, and you have a good idea of what he does with them.

N = No (something they wouldn’t do, turn offs)

Crying disturbs him. Even if you’re clearly enjoying sex, he finds himself a bit unsettled if you’re sobbing. He associates the sound too closely with pain to particularly enjoy it.

He really can’t deal with being tied up. He might give it a try, being an experimentalist at heart, but it’s too vulnerable for his liking. Plus, he always needs to be holding you in some way; it’d practically be torture to rob him of the ability to pet and kiss you. He’s too restless in general and could probably shred through his binds purely out of will.

O = Oral (preference in giving or receiving, skill, etc.)

Ghostface is used to receiving and only receiving. He’d be all for it if you asked him to pleasure you for a change, but you’ll notice right away just how out of place he feels on his knees between yours. He’s clumsy and you have to remind him to mind his teeth, but gives a commendable effort. He gets frustrated easily, so expect it to be a one time thing.

He feels much more comfortable to be on the receiving end. He’s not going to be giving you pointers or obvious indications of his pleasure, so it’s up to you to discern if you’re doing well or not. You can safely presume you’re doing something right if he suddenly grips you by the hair.

For Danny, he naturally gets handsy when in pleasure, but he’ll try to keep your comfort in mind and keep his hand resting on the back of your head instead of grabbing or tugging. He is actually surprisingly gentle, most of the time, stroking your hair or your cheek if in reach, lacing his hand with yours; he makes it feel weirdly romantic, a feeling you wouldn’t contribute to him, or not genuinely. He could so easily work his words to illicit the same feeling, although unauthentically, yet he still makes you feel special.

P = Pace (are they fast and rough? slow and sensual? etc.)

Ghostface swaps between the two periodically. It has to do a lot with his mood, but generally he’s rough, gripping your wrists or pinning you down, securing your hips between his knees. He’s slow, most of the time; stretching out deep thrusts so he can watch you writhe.

Q = Quickie (their opinions on quickies, how often, etc.)

Ghostface likes to take his time. He’s used to sneaking in quick kills in a time limit, but if the stress isn’t necessary he doesn’t see the point. Rushed sex is exciting, yes, but he doesn’t consider it the same. He wants to show you the extent of his attraction, which isn’t so easy when you have a deadline.

R = Risk (are they game to experiment? do they take risks? etc.)

To a degree, yes. He’s not opposed to partial publicity, but he’ll ultimately always want a semblance of control over the environment during sex. The other killers get more than an earful of you two’s exploits, but he doesn’t think they need a first-hand example. Danny loves you and loves showing you off, but the idea of someone seeing doesn’t excite him nearly as much as it makes his chest twist with a bit of jealousy.

He’s realistically way more at risk than you ever will be; he’s quick to get ahead of himself, urging you to manhandle him however you like. He can’t get enough of your touch, whether sweet, feathery strokes or rough and stinging palms on skin, but the latter he’s especially fond of. You can choke him half to death and he would only ask for more.

S = Stamina (how many rounds can they go for? how long do they last?)

Depends. The most straightforward answer is that he lasts as long as you do. He’s got an impressive amount of resilience, typically lasting somewhere between two to three rounds.

T = Toys (do they own toys? do they use them? on a partner or themselves?)

He never owned anything before meeting you. He swiped a few paddles and pairs of handcuffs from victims in the past, but only really because it made him laugh in the moment. He doesn’t view them as anything more than gag bits and isn’t likely to actually use them on you.

If he could get his hands on some more discreet paraphernalia, and if you showed interest, he might try out a few toys. On himself is probably a hard no, but he’d love to test them on you. He loves watching your expressions and he could never get sick of the way you squirm deliciously, so he could see the appeal. He’d be up to try them on himself, but still declares your touch to be the best. He’d rather it be your hands on him, breaking him down.

U = Unfair (how much they like to tease)

Oh, it’s his favorite thing, he may even like it more than the actual act of sex.

He loves to stroke your thigh or nip at your bare neck; he thrives off of your reactions, no matter how small or subtle you think they are. If he gets a response, there’s really no stopping him. Any slight noise is a victory in his book. He’ll tease you until every ounce of blood in your body is in your cheeks (while his will be somewhere south of the belt). He loves how you look, flushed and shifting under his stare. He could make an album with all the photographs he has of you blushing, it’s one of his favorite views in the world, neck to neck with a freshly bleeding body.

He loves embarrassing you. One of his favorite things is making a show of preparing to fuck you—dragging his belt slowly from the loops of his pants, pulling down the zipper of his fly even slower—then making you please yourself instead. “Show me how you do it,” he encourages you. If he’s feeling nice, he’ll let you grind on his thigh with only a handful of snarky comments. But really, he loves watching you work yourself with your hands.

V = Volume (how loud they are, what sounds they make, etc.)

He’s naturally silent, to the point some would think he doesn’t breathe at all. The most you’ll ever really get out of him are restrained grunts and heavy little pants. He loves how noisy you are in comparison; part of the fun is watching silently as he fucks you, how noisy you are in comparison, your subsequent embarrassment. He’s made a multitude of brief recordings made up entirely of your pleasured sounds, and if he was present for the era of convenient, compact smartphones and customizable ringtones, it’d be your breathy cries alerting him to calls (as a related side note, you can bet he’s set your blushing likeness as the wallpaper to his beat up flip phone). If you’re fairly quiet yourself, he makes it his personal goal to pull those wonderful noises from you. He has all the patience in the Entity’s Realm while working away at your resolve. You make for such lovely entertainment.

W = Wild card (a random headcanon for the character)

If you have any scars of your own, he’s very vocal about admiring them. He runs his fingers sweetly over the off-color streaks of skin and presses periodic kisses to them like tender stitch work. He pays special attention to any areas you’re insecure of, despite your embarrassment.

He loves his knife, he loves you, he loves using the knife on you (with your approval). You can’t miss the way he seems to vibrate with anticipation the first time you suggest implementing the blade. He considers it an honor for you—you’re the only one to date to be on the business end of his knife to be allowed to live after the ordeal. His hands noticeably tremble with excitement, but despite all the glaring signs implying otherwise, you’re honestly in safe hands; he’s well acquainted with the knife and works it with the same precision artists do with their favorite brush or pen. If you’d let him, he’d want to carve a small heart somewhere on your person, that or his initials. They’re shallow, careful cuts, never anything deep enough to scar, and he’s sure to tend to them later. Still, seeing those glinting beads of blood makes his pulse race.

He thinks you look so pretty in blood, whether coloring your cheeks or seeping from a fresh cut.

You have full permission to use the knife on him, alternatively. He loves the cold sting of the blade down his skin. The way you look, too, gripping a knife and looking down on him with the rare glint of power in your eyes, is dizzying. He’ll probably stop to fetch his camera for a few impromptu pictures to keep as a memento of your fun.

X = X-ray (let’s see what’s going on under those clothes)

Nothing unrealistic. Cut and pierced.

Y = Yearning (how high is their sex drive?)

Unsurprisingly high but also volatile. Sex with him is uncommon just on account of how fickle his libido is. Though sexual in nature, he has to be in a very specific mood to actually want it, but don’t worry, he’ll more than let you know in that instance.

He struggles a lot with understanding himself; it’s easy to know when he wants to kill, how best to satisfy that incessant itch, but sex is weirdly intimate, and Lord knows he’s awful with intimacy. He can be annoying in a lot of aspects, but patience is really important for him when it comes to sex; he may think he wants it, then upon engaging is unsure and withdraws. It’s not personal by any means, his sense of desire is just inconsistent. He takes note of your understanding, though, and appreciates it.

Still, expect lewd comments on a constant basis. For someone once renowned for his masterful grasp on language and cunning way with terminology, it’s not very apparent through the crude, sleazy commentary you’re personally familiar with.

Z = Zzz (how quickly they fall asleep afterwards)